Thresholds

QorUcM

ROTCH

EDITORS

Janna Israel

Andrew Todd Marcus

MANAGING EDITOR

Christine Caspar

WEB DESIGNER
Carl Solander

ADVISORY BOARD

Mark Jarzombek, chair
Stanford Anderson

Dennis Adams
Martin Bressani
Jean-Louis Cohen
Charles Correa
Anndam Dutta
Diane Ghirardo
Ellen Dunham-Jones
Robert Haywood
Hasan-Uddin Khan
Rodolphe el-Khoury
Leo Marx
Mary McLeod
Vikram Prakash
Kazys Varnelis
Cherie Wendelken
Gwendolyn Wright
J. Meejjn Yoon

This particular issue of Thresholds has been sup-
ported in part by a grant from the Graham
Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

PATRONS

IMRAN AHMED

MARK AND ELAINE BECK

ROBERT F. DRUM

GAIL FENSKE

R.T. FREEBAIRN-SMITH

ROBERT ALEXANDER GONZALEZ

ANNIE PEDRET

VIKRAM PRAKASH

Cover Image; Map of Europe, depicted in the form of the
crowned Virgin by Heinnch Bunting, 1581,
Title Page Image; Still from the video Between Prayers
by Cagia Hadimioglu, 2002.

JOSEPH M. SIRY

RICHARD SKENDZEL

thresholds 25

sacrosanct

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Thresholds

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For selection, editorial, design, and proofreading assistance,
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Borioli, Arindam Dutta, Erdem Erten, Margaret Graham,
Cagia Hadimioglu, Aliki Hasiotis, Patrick Haughey, Zachary
Hinchliffe, Ally Ladha, Ijlal Muzaffar, Mine Ozkar, Jorge
Otero-Pailos, Sarah Rogers, and Katherine Wheeler Borum.

Many thanks to Tom Fitzgerald, Eduardo Gonzales, Charles
Leiserson, Jr., and Susan Midlarsky for their computing
help.

We are grateful to Nancy Jones, Melissa Kearns, and Jack
Valleli for their continued support.

Special thanks to Stanford Anderson and Mark Jarzombek.

^Copyright Fall 2002

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

ISSN: 1091-711X

Printed by Sherman Printing, Canton, Massachusetts.
Body text set in Univers; titles set in Orator; digitally pub-
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JANNA ISRAEL 4 CONTENTS

Introduction

FREDERICK M. ASHER 8

Shaping Contestation: The Katra Mound of Mathura

JOANNA PICCIOTTO 14

Progress and the Space of Prehistory

DANIEL BERTRAND MONK 20

An Interview Conducted by Michael Osman, Zeynep Celik, and Lucia Allais

CAROLINE JONES 24

Mining the Lode

FERNANDO DOMEYKO 30

Church and Community Center in Las Brisas de Santo Domingo, Chile

JESUS MARIA APARICIO GUISADO 34

Church in Andalusia

MARK JARZOMBEK 38

Beltotto's Dresden: Framing the Dialectics of Porcelain

JONATHAN COONEY 43

Creating Sacred Space Outdoors: The Primitive Methodist Camp Meeting in England, 1819-1840

GLAIRE ANDERSON 48

The Cathedral in the Mosque and the Two Palaces:
Additions to the Great Mosque of Cordoba and the Alhambra during the Reign of Charles V

NASSER RABBAT 56

In the Beginning Was The House: On the Image of the Two Noble Sanctuaries of Islam

CAGLA HADIMIOGLU 60

Between Prayers: Proscribed Scenes from a Historic Monument

SAMER AKKACH 68

Religious Mapping and the Spatiality of Difference

JAMES ELKINS 76

From Bird-Goddesses to Jesus 2000: A Very, Very Brief History of Religion and Art

FLORIAN URBAN 84

The Spirit of the City: Transcendence and Urban Design in Postwar Berlin

JAE CHA 90

Church in Urubo, Bolivia

Illustration Credits 94

Contributors 95

Call for Submissions 96

JANNA ISRAEL
INTRODUCTION

(f* - ^ . c

What is a Wife & what is a Harlot? What is a
Church? & What is a Theatre? are they Two and
not One? Can they Exist Separate? Are not
Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood
is Religion. 0 Demonstrations of Reason Dividing
Families in Cruelty & Pride'
— William Blake, Jerusalem 57:8-10

The well-editorialized controversy that took place at the end
of 1999 over the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition,
"Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi
Collection," centered around Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's
attempt to cut funding to the Museum, principally due to
the inclusion of the 1996 Chris Ofili painting. The Holy
Virgin Mary. It depicts a black Virgin covered with glitter,
map tacks, collages of bare backsides floating around the
figure like putti, and the infamous elephant excrement,
apparently ubiquitous in Zimbabwe where the artist had
once gone for research. While the audiotape accompanying
the exhibition cited the artist's experiments with materials
to create an "earthy" Virgin, Giuliani referred to the show,
and Ofili's piece in particular, as "Catholic-bashing."'

The sensationalism of Ofili's painting was the curator's tri-
umph, which escaped Giuliani as he threatened censorship
during the senatorial campaign. Contrast the reaction to the
"Sensation" exhibition with the isolated instances of "sub-
version" in the modern religious art collections in the
Vatican Museums. Visitors often spend little time in or
bypass the Borgia apartments which house the modern reli-
gious art collection. Most of the art in the collection con-

14 ''INTRODUCTION

sists of familiar religious tfiemes, scenes from the Bible,
abstract religious symbolism, arid several portraits of popes.

One portrait In particular, Francis Bacon's 1953 Study for a
Pope II reconsiders Velazquez' 1650 portrait of Pope
Innocent X as a shadowy, slouched figure with distorted
facial features in front of a dark background. Throughout
the 1950s, Bacon frequently reworked the Velazquez por-
trait and revisited his own Interpretations of the seven-
teenth-century painting. He paired the pope with a chim-
panzee In one version; in others, the pope covers his face
as though in shame or he screams; he always seems some-
how prurient.

Bacon serves as an unlikely beacon of modern religious art
at the Vatican; he was openly homosexual, eschewed
organized religion and he often subverted motifs of
Christianity In his work. However, he explained his frequent
return to the portrait as the pursuit of a formal line of
inquiry — not as an explicit critique of Catholicism or its fig-
urehead.^ But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the
figure of the pope was related for Bacon to primordial feel-
ings of bestial entrapment and it is hard to look at Bacon's
Pope in the Vatican without seeing the painting as a part of
the series.

If Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary found an audience in the
unstable, but profitable ground of hype. Bacon's Pope now
festers, largely unnoticed, as a legitimate religious art object
by the authority of the Church. The divergent lives of the
two paintings have been determined, for the most part, by
exposure, but the two paintings illustrate the easy use of
religious rhetoric for political gain, despite the relatively
short span of the shadow cast by religion on contemporary
secular life. The Bacon painting was a gift from the power-
ful Fiat magnate, Gianni Agnelli; its place on the Vatican
Museums' walls contains its power of critique. In any
event, the pope has not threatened to cut off funding to the
Vatican for exhibiting images which could be considered as
partaking in "Catholic-bashing."

This issue of Thresholds explores the way in which art,
architecture, landscapes, and cities, real and imagined, pur-
sue, sustain, and even elude sacred identities. As the Ofilli
and the Bacon paintings show, a specific religious identity
is often imposed onto a work. Many of the articles present-
ed here address not only how religious rhetoric can distort
the reception of an object, but how the absence of an initi-
ating presence for faith also distorts its representation.

INTRODUCTION' 5

Visual, metaphorical, allegorical, or spatial manifestations of
religion and spirituality rely in some capacity on the distor-
tion of the known and recognizable world through the inter-
pretation of doctrine and sacred texts; the explanation of
religious belief generally occurs within the basic contours of
what is known, but the distortion lies in the qualification by
the imposition of literature and doctrine.

Inherited religious myths are themselves distorted, re-pre-
sented anew, as in the image of Adam as a "man with
microscopes and telescopes for eyes." Joanna Picciotto
describes the framing of experimentalism on the cusp of the
Enlightenment through interpretations of the book of
Genesis. She argues that scientists and politicians envi-
sioned themselves as inhabiting a state of purgation, phys-
ically and intellectually laboring to achieve objectivity and
scientific progress, paradoxically, through a return to
Adamic innocence. While Scripture provided a framework
for the experimental enterprise of the seventeenth-century
scientist, the use of early Islamic texts to chart territory ren-
dered space malleable far from contemporary understand-
ings of accuracy. Samer Akkach shows that the pre-modern
absence of a scientific grounding for geography often trans-
posed the world into an icon, based on theological and reli-
gious texts. The texts and the visual imagination served to
mutually reinforce each other as the space between sacred
sites collapsed based on religious continuity rather than
geographic distance.

The repeated use of religious rhetoric in the political realm
also serves to distort. Claims to "promised lands," sites
consigned by "covenant' or "divine ordinance," and colonial
enterprises ideologically founded on conversion have been
legitimized by the authority of religious doctrine and scrip-
tural narratives. Daniel Monk discusses the "abstraction" of
architecture in the conflict over land in Palestine and Israel
to achieve political "immediacy." The designation of a site
as holy turns it into a symbol with a willfully unstable mean-
ing as the drive towards a religiously idealized history splits
from the actual version of a site's history.

Florian Urban examines how the conception of post World
War II Berlin brought about similar abstractions in the
attempt to regain what was believed to be the city's aura.
He describes plans for the rebuilding of the city to under-
stand the spiritual identification with an idealized past and

the near impossibility of its replication. While it may be dif-
ficult for the living city to face its history and find its spiri-
tual center, it is, however, the aspiration of religious build-
ing. Nasser Rabbat describes how the Mosque of the
Prophet in Medina and the Ka'ba in Mecca serve double pur-
poses as holy sites; they represent Koranic interpretations
of faith and they give shape to collective memory. His iden-
tification of a fusion between universal acts of devotion and
evocations of private life begins to dissolve the entrenched
demarcations of sacred and profane space in histories of
religious sites.

The articles here show that while the strength of religion is
historically conditioned, the tenacity of faith in classifying
objects and places as sacred, sacrilegious, idolatrous, pro-
fane, didactic, etc. continues to be as much a function of
politics and the survival mechanisms of belief systems as it
is theologically motivated. In the case of the Ofili and Bacon
paintings, they have been assigned to their opposing reli-
gious posts by the government and the Church respective-
ly. While the religious intent of the Bacon and Ofili paintings
is not immediately apparent, Francis Bacon's ritual return to
the pope through his deformations of Velazquez' Innocent
X and Ofili's attempt to create of a more regionally specific
Virgin literally distort the familiar representation of the
image. By reconfiguring conventional religious motifs, they
question the very nature of the iconic figures themselves.
Thus, the branded heretic is often more accurately the artis-
tic inquisitor, shirking the mimetic protocols of doctrinal rit-
ual and meaning in favor of a spiritual inspiration from out-
side the proscribed parameters of religion.

Notes

1 . Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Coilection (New York,
Thames and Hudson, 19981 133.

2 Francis Bacon: Important Paintings from the Estate (New York: Tony Shafrazi
Gallery, 1998.), 24.

Illustrations

Fig 1 : Chris Otili. T/ie Holy Virgin Mary. 1996.

Fig 2: Francis Bacon, Study for a Pope II, Collection of Modern Religious Art,

The Vatican Museums.

Fig. 3: Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1 953.

6 /INTRODUCTION

"What is the meaning of red?" the blind miniaturist who'd
drawn the horse from memory asl<ed again,

"The meaning of color is that it is there before us and we
see it, " said the other. "Red cannot be explained to he who
cannot see. "

"To deny God's existence, victims of Satan maintain that
God is not visible to us," said the blind miniaturist who'd
rendered the horse.

"Yet, He appears to those who can see, " said the other
master. "It is for this reason that the Koran states that the
blind and the seeing are not equal. "

My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk

FREDERICK M. ASHER
SHAPING CONTESTATION:
THE KATRA MOUND OF MATHURA

Introduction

Anyone who takes a course in the art of India will encounter
a late first-century figure commonly known as the Katra
Buddha, found at the Katra Mound in Mathura, about 145
kilometers south of Delhi (Fig. 1). They will not, however,
encounter the very long and contentious history of this
sculpture's find spot, a history which continues to have
intense ramifications for the present.

The Katra Mound is located on the western side of Mathura,
adjacent to the Bhuteshar Mound, where extensive
Buddhist remains were excavated, and less than a kilome-
ter from the so-called Jam Stupa site, the Kankali Tila.'
That the Katra Mound was the site of a Buddhist monastery
seems likely due to the several images of Buddha found
there. 2 But the Buddhist monastery was not the only occu-
pant of the Katra Mound. Objects with Jain and
Brahmanical images such as a Kushan-period pedestal
inscribed with an image of a seated Tirthankara and a Gupta
lintel with an image of the Hindu god Vishnu were also
found there. 3 We know that it was the location of the
Keshavadeva temple, a Hindu temple, dismantled under
Aurangzeb's orders and replaced with a great mosque that
still occupies the site (Fig. 2).*

The replacement of a temple by a mosque was clearly inten-.
tional and sequential. But should we assume, as Alexander
Cunningham asserts, that the Katra Mound has always
been occupied sequentially, that is, first by Buddhists, then
Brahmans, and finally Musalmans?^ This assertion, and oth-
ers like it, assumes exclusive propriety of the sacred site at
any given time, a notion that fits well with the assumptions
of certain types of art history, committed to explaining his-
tory in sequences. But is that notion largely a construct of

8 ,' ASHER

a present-day world in which territory is more often con-
tested on religious grounds than simply shared?

We must situate the destruction and transformation of the
Keshavadeva temple in its historical context. The temple
was built at the beginning of the seventeenth century by
Fiaja Bir Singh Deo of Orchha and was supported by impe-
rial Mughal funds. Thus, it was not a temple of great antiq-
uity and it was specifically associated with the memory of
a living person — still alive in 1669, when the temple was
destroyed in retaliation for Jat uprisings in the area around
Mathura. Mughal losses were massive and included the
Mughal commandant of Mathura. ^ The destruction was
thus politically, not religiously, motivated.

Today, the site has been imbued with a new meaning. It has
been identified as the locus of Krishna's birthplace, and a
large temple complex has been constructed immediately

abutting the mosque. The space is not just contested, it is
highly charged. A temple marks what is now known as
Krishna Janmabhumi, the site claimed as the exact location
of his birth (Fig. 4). Another temple, still newer and even
larger, celebrates the site of Krishna's birth, if not its pre-
cise location. Thousands descend everyday upon the tem-
ple compound. By contrast, however, few visitors go to the
old mosque even though its entrance is only several hun-
dred meters away from the entrance to the temple com-
pound. Even though the mosque remains standing at the
moment. Viva Hindu Parishad is intent on its demolition.

Religious Interaction and
Identity in Pre-Modern India

The current tension between Hindus and Muslims in India is
largely a result of a colonial insistence on defining individual
identity based on religion rather than on any pre-colonial
social phenomenon (Fig. 3). Even in recent history, the

ASHER/ 9

notion of distinct religious and ceremonial spaces was not
entirely pertinent. For example, a report in the nineteenth-
century edition of the Gwallor District Gazetteer states:

There has been a custom, since the days of the
Maratha rule, for the people of different religions
to join in the festival celebrations of other reli-
gions. For Instance, the Maharaja SIndhIa and his
Sardars used to participate in the Tazia proces-
sions during Moharram, and the Muslims took part
In Dussehra celebrations.'

"...At one of most sacred sites of Islam In all South Asia,
the Dargah of Muln-ud-DIn Chlshti," an older edition of the
Ajmer District Gazetteer notes, "the shrine of Khwaja Sahib
is venerated and visited by Hindus as well as
Muhammadans and other Indians irrespective of their reli-
gion. "8 This underscores the need to consider with care the

Bombay (Mumbal

meaning of religious identity in South Asia. To what extent
does the current makeup of religious identities devoid of
communitarian dimensions overlap with the legacy of colo-
nial reforms? Perhaps the making of this pigeonholed reli-
gious strata can be most closely associated with the first
all-India census in 1871, which mandated counting individ-
uals by religious categories conceived by the British. 9 There
are even cases in which communities identify as both
Hindus and Muslims, for example, the Patuas of Bengal or
the Meherata Rajputs of the Udaipur and Amjer Districts. 'O
In cases such as these, members of the communities do not
imagine a dual identity but rather, they simply identify with
the larger community and its culturally instilled practices. '^

There are many other examples of shared religious spaces
In India. For example, there are temples that are possibly
Hindu at the site of Buddhist monasteries such as those
from the monasteries of Sanchi and Nalanda. Their shared
forms make them essentially indistinguishable, suggesting a
common Indian visual vocabulary that extends beyond
these two religions. For example, at Khajuraho, the Jain
temples of Parshvanatha and Adinatha form part of the so-
called Eastern Group. During the fifth-century Gupta
dynasty, followers of the Hindu god Vishnu patronized a
Buddhist monastery, Nalanda, and the Mughal emperor,
Akbar, built a Hindu temple at Brindavan through his agent.
Raja Man Singh. In turn. Raja Man Singh built an enormous
mosque at Rajmahal in Bengal. Even Aurangzeb, who
destroyed Bir Singh Deo's temple on the Katra Mound and
replaced it with a mosque, granted extensive land to sup-
port the operation of Hindu temples. ^^

The Katra Mound

All pertinent pre-modern texts on the subject agree that
Krishna was born in Mathura. Yet they do not specify the
precise location of the birth in the city.'^ For this reason, all
Mathura and its environs were considered sacred, as indi-
cated by the impressively large circuit of pilgrimage sites
associated with Krishna in the region. The present siting of
the god's birthplace at the Katra Mound, therefore, does not
seem to have any real foundation in antiquity.

We have relatively little information about the temple built
by Bir Singh Deo, which was demolished and replaced by
Aurangzeb's mosque. There are no surviving inscriptions
commemorating its foundation. In addition, no other refer-
ences of such an association are found in the European and
local scholarship on the subject. For example, F.S. Growse,
the district officer of the region, recognized the importance

10 /ASHER

of Krishna to Mathura in his 1883 book, Mathura: A District
/Vlemoir.''^ But when he discusses the Katra Mound and Bir
Singh's temple that once stood there, he never identifies it
as the site of Krishna's birth. This is not simply a sign of
neglected or undiscovered evidence. Grovue's report pays
considerable attention to local traditions and reflects the
absence of a reference to any such association in them

The French jeweler, Tavernier, does not refer to Krishna's
birth in his detailed description of the site, wo centuries
before Growse.^5 Tavernier saw the temple around 1650
and describes it as the third most important temple in all
India and one of the most sumptuous in the realm, even
though, he reports, not many Hindus worship there.
Tavernier notes his encounter with the priests and even
describes viewing the temple's main image, but nowhere
does he suggest its association with the birth of the god
Krishna. '6

Many historians have argued that Bir Singh's temple was
not the first at the site. Some six hundred years later,
Badauni, now well-known for his anti-Hindu stance, argued

that there had been a temple on the Katra site which Sultan
Mahmud of Ghazni destroyed when he raided Mathura in
1017.1^ We also have Mahmud's own claim that the
numerous idols he destroyed in a temple at Mathura yield-
ed immense amounts of gold and jewels. ''^

The damage wrought by Mahmud did not last long. An
inscription found at the Katra Mound dated 1 1 50, that is,
133 years after the time of Mahmud of Ghazni, mentions
the construction of a temple of Vishnu at the site, so bril-
liantly white and large that it was said to be "touching the
clouds. "19 The inscription makes no mention of the claim
that this temple replaced an earlier building or that its loca-
tion marks the birthplace of Krishna. Given the complete
absence of such references in the various historical docu-
ments relating to the site, it is hard to believe that this site
was seen in 1 1 50 as Krishna's Janmabhum, or birthplace.
What happened to this temple that necessitated its replace-
ment by Bir Singh Deo is also quite uncertain. It is general-
ly stated with considerable confidence that Sikander Lodi
(r. 1489-1 517) destroyed the temple. 20 There is, however,
no historical evidence of such a claim. We only know that

AS HER/ 11

LodI constructed a mosque at Mathura and persecuted sev-
eral Hindus. We learn from the account of a Jesuit, Father
Monserrate, present from 1580-1582 at the court of the
Mughal Emperor Akbar, that many temples were found in
the area and that huge crowds of pilgrims came from all
over India to one temple in particular — one that must have
escaped Sikander Lodi's desecration, if indeed, he did des-
ecrate temples.

Krishna Janmabhumi

To what extent is a historical document of consequence to
religious belief? The present temples comprising the site
known as Krishna Janmabhumi at the Katra Mound shape
belief; they do not simply mark or commemorate it (Fig. 4).
Historically, the site has carried considerable importance.
Various versions of the Mathura Mahatmya, especially rela-
tively late versions of this text on Mathura's sanctity, con-
ceptualize the Katra Mound as the center of a lotus which
is used to map Mathura, perhaps because it is Mathura's
highest point. ^i But no version of this text associates the
Mound with Krishna's birthplace. This claim seems to have
evolved, at least in part, to strengthen legal claims to the
site. Muslims who argued that the Mound belonged to the
mosque constructed there brought the first claim to court in
1 878. Although we know little about the background of this
claim, we can surmise that it was entered because the
Muslim community began to feel that the lineage of their
mosque was seriously contested. The verdict concluded, to
the detriment of the Muslim community, that the Katra
Mound had not been owned but that King Patnimal of
Banaras had purchased it from the East India Company in
1815. At least three subsequent court cases were filed, but
they assigned ownership of the mosque to descendants of
the Hindu King Patnimal. In 1944, J. K. Biria purchased the
land from the descendants of King Patnimal with the
express intention of building a temple, apparently to com-
memorate the birthplace of Krishna. ^2 Almost immediately
after the settlement of this case in 1946, a Krishna
Janmasthan Trust was established and BirIa sold the land to
it. Work on a temple commenced in 1953, but was con-
cluded only recently. The temple includes an underground
chamber immediately abutting the qibta wall of the mosque,
believed to be the spot of Krishna's birth. The still larger
temple at the site was completed even more recently. Its
construction could not have commenced until the decision
of the last court case in 1960, which stated that the
Krishna Janmasthan Trust legally owned the property and
that Muslims were protected for use of the mosque only on
the occasion of Eid. Thus, a legal battle among parties who

identified themselves in religious terms managed to trans-
form the space of a temple into the space of a specific
sacred locus, namely, Krishna's birthplace.

The history of the Katra Mound as a contested space is only
part of the issue. The parallel issue begs the question: why
can't this space be shared by the two communities, Hindus
and Muslims, as one hopes Jerusalem can be shared — at
least its religious monuments if not its political status — by
Jews, Christians, and Muslims? The answer is, at least in
part, dependent on differing conceptions of religious space.
For those religions formed on West Asian soil, religious
space is generally conceived as a place where adherents
might gather. Most sites do not have an inherent sanctity
that goes beyond their function.

The West Asian conception of a religious structure is, how-
ever, quite different from the Hindu conception of a sacred
space. A temple is believed to be god's space, not that of
mortals. It is thus charged in ways entirely different from
space intended to accommodate mortals. This notion can
explain why religious tensions in Belfast, for example, might
be effectively fought in the streets or pubs, and those in
Jerusalem in the marketplace or on crowded buses, where-
as in India, the temple and the mosque have become the
objects of contestation.

In the case of Belfast and Jerusalem, the dominance of a
nation-state, or at least a specifically designated part of
such a modern state, appears to be the desired goal. The
protests are public and intended to intimidate the opposi-
tion, a battle that is most effectively waged in public space.
But in India, where the temple marks god's space, not that
of his worshipers, competing shrines are imagined to dimin-
ish the unique power of the deity and his ability to manifest
himself. Thus in India, the lines are drawn not just on the
basis of the religious identity, that is, along social lines, but
on the basis of structures, believed to be necessary for
god's presence.

Of course, the structure stands for more than god's pres-
ence; it is imagined as the very locus of his birth. Birth, of
course, irretrievably alters a shared space due to the evo-
cations of the womb, and is, therefore, an event invariably
fraught with contestation. This notion cannot be underesti-
mated in seeking to grasp the charged nature of birth sites
such as Ayodhya and the Katra Mound. 23

12 /AS HER

Shared Space

Are Hindus and Muslims invariably opposed? Not necessar-
ily; their opposition depends on the currency of their identi-
ty. There is at least one place where I have observed a very
different interaction between Hindus and Muslims. In
Singapore, there is a large Indian community — some 6.4%
of the population. These Indians are mostly from South
India or Bengal, and are both Hindu and Muslim. Indeed,
their religious monuments are often situated side by side,
mostly in the area called Little India, but also in other parts
of the island nation. This proximity is not based on con-
tested land. Rather, when the currency of identity is nation-
al origin — is one Chinese, Malay, or Indian? — members of
the minority group, Indian in this case, bond on the basis of
their Indian heritage rather than on the basis of their reli-
gious identity. By fragmenting themselves further — after
religious allegiance — their voices would become even more
restricted. Perhaps, this can serve as a lesson for small
nations that fracture along religious lines.

Notes

1 See Alexander Cunningham. Archaeological Survey of India Reports vol. I,
reprinted (Delhi: Indoiogical Book House. 1972). plate XXXIX, for a map of
Mathura that shows the site, there called Katara.

2 Joanna Williams, "A Mathura Gupta Buddha Reconsidered," Lalit Kal vol. 17
11974): 28-32. The well-known standing Buddha dated to 280 AD was found
beside a seated Bodhisattva of the Kushana period at the Katra Mound. Joanna
Williams has effectively shown this to be a work of the Early Gupta period.

3 V.S. Agrawala, "Catalogue of the Mathura Museum; 111. Jama Tirthankaras
and Other Miscellaneous Figures." Journal of the UP- Historical Society Vol.
XXIll (19501: 46. VS. Agrawala, "Catalogue of the Mathura Museum; II. A
Catalogue of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva in Mathura Art." Journal of the U.P.
Historical Society Vo\. XXII (1949): 109-110.

4 For a vitriolic diatribe against those who, like me. see the likelihood that the
Vaishnava temples were constructed on the remains of older Buddhist and Jam
structures, see Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Temples; What Happened to Them (New
Delhi: Voice of India, 1993), chapter 5. This should set to rest any doubt about
The political nature of arguments over this space.

5 Cunningham, 235.

6 Much of this history is summarized in Catherine Asher, Architecture of
Mughal India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 162-164.

7 Madhya Pradesh District Gazetteers. Gwalior (Bhopal: Government Central
Press, 19651, 56. The passage quotes a previous edition of the Gazetteer.

8 Rajasthan District Gazetteers, Ajmer (Jaipur: Government Central Press,
1966), 715. The passage quotes a previous edition of the Gazetteer.

9 Kenneth W. Jones. "Religious Identity and the Indian Census." in The Census

in British India, edited by N. Gerald Barrier (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981), 73-

101.

10 Binoy Bhattacharjee. Cultural Oscillation: A Study on Patua Culture

(Calcutta: Naya Prokash, 1980); Harjot Oberoi, Construction of Religious

Boundaries (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 10-12.

1 1 Oberoi, 8-9. Oberoi makes the case that in the nineteenth century, a classi-

ficatory model for religious identity that did not necessarily reflect indigenous

reality was imposed

12 Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society Vol. 5/4 (1957): 247-254.

13 A.W. Entwistle, Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage (Groningen: Egbert
Forsten, 1987).

14 F,S. Growse, Mathura: A District Memoir (Allahabad: Northwestern
Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1883),

15 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, edited by V. Ball and William
Crooke (New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp., 1976), 187,

16 Tavernier. 187,

17 George S.A, Ranking, ed. and trans., Muntakhb-ut-Tawarikh (Calcutta:
Baptist Mission Press, 1898), 24-25, See also Entwistle, 125. He asserts that
Mahmud destroyed the temple, yet he offers no historical evidence for his claim.

18 For a translation of Mahmud's reference to the conquest of Mathura, see
Abu al-Nasr Abd al-Jabbar, The Kitab-i-Yamini: Historical Memoirs of the Amir
Sabaktagin, and the Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (London: Oriental Translation
Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1858). 454-456. This suggests that Mahmud
and other Muslim invaders after him sought valuable commodities much more
than the satisfaction of engaging in iconoclastic despoilment. In pre-modern
warfare, one way of encouraging and paying an army was the promise of plun-
der. In Islam — as in the other Western Asian religions, namely Christianity and
Judaism — religious structures are gathering places; they are congregational,
quite unlike a Hindu temple. It is likely that conquerors such as Mahmud of
Ghazni imagined that by destroying temples they were eradicating gathering
places for people, an institution fundamental to a social network and thus, to
the potential resistance.

19 Georg Buhler, "The Mathura Prasasti of the Reign of Vijayapala, Dated
Samvat 1207." Epigraphia Indica Vol. I (1892): 287-293.

20 Entwistle, 134-136.

21 Ibid., 320.

22 Ibid., 216-217.

23 I am indebted to my colleague, Jane Blocker, for this insight. I need to pur-
sue this point further in order to understand better the charged nature of these
birth sites.

Illustrations

Fig. 1: Buddha from the Katra Mound. Mathura.
Fig. 2: Idgah Mosque adjacent to Krishna Janmabhumi.
Fig. 3: Map showing Mathura and related sites.
Fig. 4: Krishna Janmabhumi, overall view.

ASHER/ 13

JOANNA PICCIOTTO

PROGRESS AND THE SPACE OF PREHISTORY

In early modern England, experimental philosophers and the
writers they influenced were entranced by the research
question put forward by Francis Bacon: whether "that same
commerce of the mind and of things. ..might by any means
be entirely restored" to its perfect and original condition."''
The mortification of Copernicanism, the epiphany of a
microworld beneath the threshold of visibility, and the res-
urrection of the ancient atomists' distinction between pri-
mary and secondary qualities all provided reasons for exper-
imentalists to believe that the first man had been immune
to perceptual limitation and rational error; in his created
state, at least, man must have been equal to his status as
the sovereign and designated witness of creation.
Innocence was thus to be identified not with ignorance, but
with insight. Understood as the subject of extreme episte-
mological privilege, Adam was not a nostalgia-inspiring fig-
ure, his experience of the world being utterly alien by defi-
nition. The early modern laboratory was consecrated to the
task of reversing the moment of transformation from the
alien to the familiar; here, experimentalists attempted to
break down the phenomenological boundary that separated
corrupted humanity from created humanity.

Experimentalists glimpsed their idealized self-image in the
Adam who named the creatures iGenesis 2:19). Taking the
opportunity in his History of the Royal Society to muse on
"the first service, that Adam perform'd to his Creator, when
he obey'd him in mustring, and naming, and looking into the
Nature of all the Creatures," Bishop Thomas Sprat grew
wistful: "this had bin the only Religion, if men had contin-
ued innocent in Paradise."^ Sprat's redescription of the
scene of naming as the first act of obedience fuses worship
of God with the gratification of curiosity, the cognitive
appetite once held responsible for the fall. It also dilates the

scene of naming to encompass experimental methods:
Adam did not just name the creatures after surveying them,
he mustered and looked into them; through techniques like
dissection and the use of optical instruments, the experi-
mentalist did the same. Revealing to readers of his
MIcrographia the "stupendious Mechanisms and con-
trivances" that characterize "the smallest and most despi-
cable Fly" when viewed under a microscope, Robert Hooke
wondered, "Who knows but Adam might from some such
contemplation, give names to all creatures?" Hooke went
on to suggest that God has given us "a capacity, which,
assisted with diligence and industry," might enable us to
see what Adam saw, and to assign the same names to
nature. 3 To claim, as Joseph Glanvill, that Adam had not
originally needed "Galileo's tube" in order to contemplate
distant planets, and that "he had as clear a perception of
the earths motion, as we think we have of its quiescence"
was clearly to celebrate contemporary discoveries." Just as
the image of Adam as a man with microscopes and tele-
scopes for eyes lifts technology out of history, the trans-
formation of Eden into a specifically epistemological para-
dise cleanses originary desire of any attachment to a privi-
leged time or place.

The doctrine of original sin made identification with Adam
compulsory at the moment of the first disobedience; exper-
imentalists grasped this compulsory identification, using the
innocent Adam to designate the expression of human intel-
lectual potential under ideal conditions — conditions that
they worked to recreate. If no single individual had a claim
on the privileged perspective of humanity's first representa-
tive, the collective subject of the new science did. As
experimentalists worked to transform their identification
with Adam into a relationship of identity, the metaphorical

in /PICCIOTTO

link between the laboratory and paradise became mutually
conditioning. The project of paradlsal recovery was
enmeshed in the cognitive and physical struggles that char-
acterize efforts to construct an objective perspective on the
world: the impossibility of the goal guaranteed its perma-
nence. The means and the end of paradisal recovery col-
lapsed, and Eden came to assume the features of a work-
ing laboratory.

While the godly cognitive appetite was an incentive to
industry in Adam, Eve's association with carnal appetite
sanctioned a new etiology of the first sin as the perversion
of the first virtue; "idle curiosity." Eve fell because she
"neglected her daily Work" and "was at leisure," not
because she exhibited an investigative interest in God's
work, which would have been laudable. The fall was the
result of an insufficiently rigorous curiosity, which tempted
her to put her trust in "thin Apparence" and "subtle
Fallacies." The sin represented by the forbidden fruit was
not the desire for knowledge but the desire, in the words of
John Milton's Eve, to "feed at once both Bodie and Mind,"
rather than working to subject the body to the demands of
the mind. The experimentalist etiology of sin reveals inno-
cence to be a metfiod. The regenerate intellectual laborer
who displayed intellectual chastity or a "virgin Mind" — the
willed innocence or objectivity of the modern scientist —
along with a commitment to continuous labor was the prod-
uct of this method. 5 The intellectual hunger and restless-
ness once associated with the internalized serpent of origi-
nal sin thus motivated a divinely sanctioned disciplinary reg-
imen of perpetual self-exertion, a complex and torturous
process whose aim was to recover paradise by the very
means it was once thought to have been lost.

actually relieved by the curse, which reassures him that he
won't be, as he puts it, "unemployed" after his expulsion
from the garden. When the young Robert Boyle built his first
laboratory — literally a "workroom" — on his estate, he felt
like he had escaped into "Elysium." Describing the bitter-
sweet pleasures of investigation he pursued there, Boyle
observed that the success of his "best toils" only engaged
him in new ones. The work involved not only to regain but
simply to inhabit paradise was perpetual.

This georgic ideal of paradise seems a far cry from medieval
depictions of Eden as a hortus conclusus, but it extends
medieval treatments of the postlapsarian Adam as the first
laborer. Medieval representations of the garden control the
conceptual fertility of Eden as a symbolic site of human
achievement and self-sufficiency, identifying the enclosed
fertility of Eden with the Mother of Christ, the second
Adam. In medieval representations of the fall and the curse,
however, we see Adam and Eve unobscured by Marian
camouflage. Compared to the decorous and static imagery
of the enclosed garden, such representations seem posi-
tively boisterous since they show Adam and Eve at work. A
thirteenth-century English Book of Hours depicts an angel
giving a spade and distaff to Adam and Eve; the rose win-
dow in the north transept of the Lincoln Cathedral features
"the angel instructing Adam and Eve in the arts of digging
and spinning."^ These angelic overseers encourage us to
regard the scenes they grace as independently celebratory
images of the laborers from whom all human beings
descended and in whom they were all represented. If these
images look forward to Christ at all, it is by suggesting not
a need for Christ, but a continuity with him in his kenosis
as a homo pauperrimus.

The identification of the innocent Adam as a physical and
intellectual laborer promoted the notion that regenerate
intellectual pursuits, far from being the fruits of idleness,
were in fact work. In his treatise on paradise, which he ded-
icated to Bacon, John Salkeld insists that innocent man
would not have been happy living an Idle life; hence "Man
therefore is no sooner made, then he is set to work. ..that
hee working might keepe paradise, and paradise by the
same worke might keep him from idleness, from sinne." It
follows that if "cheerefully we go about our business, so
much nearer we come to our Paradise." This laborious pro-
gram of imitatio Adami renders work "a recreation, and
rejoicing of the will and minde," and a means to make and
keep the self holy.® Since "Wearisome toiles, and labours"
turn out to be the very stuff of paradise, Milton's Adam is

Throughout the Middle Ages, the motif of Adam at work
evoked the equality of humanity's original state. The
proverb "When Adam delf and Eve span, / Whare was than
the pride of man?" blended the ontological prestige of the
original order of creation with work, the most prominent
feature of the fallen world. It suspends the first laborer
between his fallen and unfallen state; the image of the first
laborer in his humility and lack of pride merges with Adam
in the state of blameless innocence. John Ball, one of the
leaders of the Peasants Revolt of 1381, devoted his cele-
brated Blackheath sermon to expounding a variant of the
proverb; "Whanne Adam dalfe and Eve span, / Who was
thanne a gentil man?" arguing that "all were created to be
equal by nature la natura] from the beginning Is principio]."
Fusing "by nature" and "from the beginning," this originary

PICCIOTTO,' 15

Uati ^ctn bo/cTi o5cr ^bcln

1, '

fctect-prft vt>i5er ^vxcv n^iC^ Ji

16 'PICCIOTTO

mode of thought performs revolutionary work, identifying
the absolutely novel with the originary and the "real. "8

Ball's sermon was revived in the activities of the Diggers,
who assumed control of St. George's Hill in Surrey in 1649,
claiming collective ownership of this land on the basis of
the labor they had invested in it. This project of "acting with
Plow and Spade" — creating revolution through the work of
"delving" — depended on a collective identification with
Adam. As their leader Gerrard Winstanley put it, "The Earth
in the first Creation of it, was freely given to whole
mankind, without respect of Persons;" the word of com-
mand was imparted "to whole mankinde (not to one or a
few single branches of mankindel to take possession." The
"naked Spademen" who were causing such commotion, he
explained, are Adam, who is now "risen to great strength,
and the whole Earth is now filled with him." As Eden was
restored on St. George's Hill, the "Lord of the Earth" was
revealed to be all people willing to imitate the first working
sovereign. The freedom to labor, to enjoy "the free content
of the fruits and crops of this outward Earth, upon which
their bodies stand: this was called The mans innocency, or
pleasure in the Garden before the fall." Work is not the
result of the curse but a recovery of innocence and delight.
In digging and delving, the Diggers asked only to "quietly
improve the. ..Common Land. ..thereby our own Land will be
increased with all sorts of Commodities." The restoration of
paradisal communism would generate commodities for the
comfort of human life; as Bacon's research framework
posited, the project of Edenic restoration coincided with a
process of continual improvement. ^

Both the scientific and political revolutions of seventeenth-
century England thus depended on a collective identification
with the first intellectual and physical laborer. The Diggers'
recovery of the original state of nature, like the experimen-
talists' recovery of Adam's understanding of and control
over the natural world, demanded the investment of human
energy in a necessarily imperfect and accretional activity
whose ultimate goal no individual participant would survive
to reach. Addressing a reader who is experiencing "confu-
sions that are in the world, or in your owne heart, concern-
ing the first Adam," the prophet Henry Pinnell declared.

These may goe to the plow-man for their answer
and satisfaction: He will tell them that by the con-
tinuall motion of his Cart and Plow wheeles, he
hath his business done, whereas if they stood
still, he could have no seed sowne, no crop

reaped, nor any profit at all made of his land; yet
in the revolution of the wheel, no spoke therein is
alwayes fixed either upward or downward. ..the
spirit of life within keeps this wheel in motion:
God will have his people make a progresse; He
will carry them from dispensation to dispensation;
from strength to strength, and never let them
stand still (in any forme) till they appeare in the
perfection and beauty of the Spirit. i°

In this tendentiously workmanlike image, the plowman get-
ting "his business done" does the work of paradise and
stands as an exemplum for a whole nation. The "spirit of
life" is captured in the movement of his cart and plow; by
perpetually returning to their starting point the wheels move
the vehicle, and his labor, forward. Revolution originally
meant a turning back to the first point. The term first used
to articulate fidelity to origins had become the vocabulary of
progress. 1 '

A fifteenth-century manuscript illumination examined by
Stephen Greenblatt in Hamlet in Purgatory suggests a wider
context for understanding the identification of Adam's labor
power with the force of progress. ^ 2 |^ depicts a lone peas-
ant raising a hoe above his head; he is either working the
field or digging a grave. In either case, he is an Adamic
"delver." Although the ground he is tilling seems solid to
him, our cross-section view reveals it to be paper-thin. Just
beneath the earth's surface is a cavern containing two
chambers, hell and purgatory, into which the unsuspecting
delver is clearly digging his way. An unsentimental sense of
the trajectory of fallen life is here contracted into an effi-
cient little emblem: a life of incessant work abruptly con-
cluding in either damnation or redemption. Hell and
Purgatory appear to be almost identical; both are filled with
naked people undergoing torments in flames, but the pur-
gatorial flames are graced by the presence of an angel while
the torments of hell are presided over by a demon. When
we look more closely, we find that the angel's gesture reca-
pitulates the upwards slant of Adam's hoe; both contrast
with the devil's downward gesture. The link is so unmis-
takable that it seems like a riff on the motif of the angel
handing Adam his working tools. A visual link is thus estab-
lished between purgation and labor, between the trial by fire
and the trial of work.

How did this link survive the dissolution of purgatory? An
early seventeenth-century book of spiritual exercises pro-
vides a clue: it is called Adam's Garden: A Meditation of

P ICC I OTTO/ 17

Thankfulnesse and Praises Unto the Lord, for the Returne
and Restore of Adam and his Posteritie: Planted as Flowers
in a Garden, and published by a Gentle-man, long exercised,
and happilie trained in the schoole of God's afflictions.
Presenting spiritual meditation and exercise as a method of
replanting Adam's garden, it elaborates the themes of
return and restoration in floral code. "This exercise I call
Adams Garden," the writer explains; he asks God to "heipe
mee, to plant, to square, and frame everie quarter. ..to
undergoe my calling, to digge and delve still, by penaltie
from the first Adam."^^ This figurative delving is not just a
penalty for sin but a way to purge oneself of it; yet the
action of purgation is undertaken in a space very like the
one that this action is supposed to restore. The means and
end of return have again become blended together. Shot
through with the purgatorial language of trial, the treatise
weaves into its horticultural frame the conventional motifs
of purgatory as both a fiery chamber and a school to pre-
pare for heaven. This Adamic delver thanks God for
"instructing and nurturing mee in thy owne most holy
schoole of discipline" where he is "shaken with the rods of
thy schoole and academy;" he is grateful to be made
"sweete and acceptable, by the often scowring and purging
of that inherent corruption."''' It is not merely that labor and
purgation are associated: labor is purgation, and, more
strangely, it is somehow also paradisal. Purgatorial burning
was also woven into Winstanley's paradisal labors: mem-
bers of the Digger collective had to cleanse themselves of
the "corrupt bloud" which was responsible for vainglorious
institutions like monarchy, a corruption "that runs in every
man, and womans vaines, more or lesse, till reason the spir-
it of burning cast him out;" the burning and casting out of
pride, the root of all sin, was accomplished through the
exercise of reason and through the exertion of labor, the
innocent tilling of the earth. '5

The disappearance of purgatory made it essential to experi-
ence purgatory while still on earth: William Gibson's
Election and Reprobation Scripturally and Experimentally
Witnessed unto London warns the reader against those who
"preach up IMPERFECTION and SIN for Term of Life,"
stressing that justification through faith does not mean that
those who receive grace can't lose it; through "Sloth,
Neglicence, and Unwatchfulness," people can and do so all
the time. It is by undertaking a life-long labor that we can
become — and keep becoming — "new creatures." "We will
have no other opportunity to do so: neither is there any

Purgatory (as some do falsly preach) to purge people from
their sins after they are dead and put in their Graves;" the
time to enter "the Heavenly Spiritual School" is now.'^ The
dissolution of purgatory deprived sacred geography of a
sense of progress. As Jacques le Goff and Greenblatt argue,
heaven and hell resist the rule of narrative, but purgatory is
a space of and for narrative. Fermenting, incomplete,
processual, it existed to enable the story of the soul's
progress.'^ Eden took on the newly evacuated functions of
this space: having once simply marked a site of origin, Eden
now began to mark a moveable terminus of human poten-
tial. Extravagantly dilated descriptions of life in Eden
attempted an imaginative recovery of innocent life, filling
this once brief and thin existence with an ontological full-
ness and a degree of dynamic activity it had never had
before. It was through such descriptions that the concept
of innocence itself came to accommodate process: came to
demand, in fact, the ongoing efforts of the fallen. The
unleashing of purgatorial process from its postmortem
chamber resulted in the creation of a purgatorial world, from
which the regenerate could work to extract the materials for
a paradise of their own making.

The banishment of purgatory was thus paradoxically an
expansion of its functions. Greenblatt notes that in Paradise
Lost, Milton does not feel compelled to go out of his way
to refute the doctrine of purgatory: in Milton's epic, and the
culture it reflects, there is "no purgatorial space at all;" per-
haps another way to put this idea is that, in this culture,
there is no escaping purgatory. One searches vainly in
Milton's cosmos for a static place of rest resembling
Dante's Heaven; even Milton's angels engage in continuous
labor to converge more closely towards God. Salkeld made
paradise itself into a sort of purgatory when he suggested
that it was "not likely that man should have beene confined
there onely, until the time of his translation into a more
happy estate, which should have bin after his sufficient tri-
all in the terrene of Paradise. "'^ Redescribing Eden as a
place of trial to prepare Adam and Eve for heaven identified
the state of innocence with the dynamic state of regenerate
life in general. In the Edenic laboratory, the purgatorial
nature of the trials conducted there, and in the newly dig-
nified labors of the mind and body on the fallen world, the
means and ends of paradisal return became entangled, and
the very project of recovering Eden, or becoming Adam,
became itself "paradisal" — and purgatorial. Paradise had
begun its journey into future time.

18 /PICCIOTTO

Notes

1 Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning, or the
Partitions of Sciences, interpreted by Gilbert Watts (Oxford, 1640), 1.

2 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving
of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), 349-50.

3 Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute
Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (London, 1667), 154.

4 Joeph GlanvitI, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, or Confidence in Opinions,
Manifested in a Discourse of the Shortness and Uncertainty of our Knov/ledge.
and its Causes, with some Reflexions on Peripatecism and an Apology for
Philosophy [London. 1661). 5.

5 An Essay upon Idleness, or. Chusing to Live without Business (London,
1707), 3; Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana: Or a
Fabrick of Science Natural Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London, 1654), 6,
2; John Milton, Paradise Lost, second edition, edited by Alastair Fowler (New
York: Longman, 1998). IX. 779.

6 John Salkeld, A Treatise of Paradise and the Principall Contents thereof
(London, 1617), 143-6,

7 Diane McCoHey. A Gust for Paradise: Milton's Eden and the Visual Arts
(Urbana: University of Illinois, 1992). 28, 156; Jean Delumeau. A History of
Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition, translated by Matthew
O'Connell (New York: Continuum, 1995), chapter 6.

8 Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University
of California), 108-1 1 ; Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant
Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (New York. 1973). 211.

9 A Declaration to all the Powers of England, and to all the Powers of the World,
shewing the cause why the common people of England have begun, and gives

consent to digge up. manure, and sowe corn upon George-Hill in Surry; by those
that have subscribed, and thousands more that gives consent in The True
Leveller's Standard Advanced (1 649); Gerrard Winstanley. A New Yeers Gift for
the Parliament and Armie (London, 1650). 3. 5, 26, 28.

10 Henry Pinnell, A Word of Prophesy, concerning the Parliament, generall. and
the Army (Cornhill 1648). A6v, A6.

1 1 Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 286; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline
of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971). 430.

12 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University
Press. 2001). 51.

1 3 Perhaps by Thomas Saville, (London, 1611), A3v, 1 .

14 Ibid,, 14, 21-3.

15 England's Spirit Unfolded (London. 1650). reprinted in The Intellectual
Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, edited by Charles Webster (London:
Routledge, 19741, 121.

16 William Gibson. Election and Reprobation Scnpturally and Experimentally
Witnessed unto London {London. 1678), 107-109.

17 Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, translated by Arthur Goldhammer,
(Chicago, University of Chicago. 1984).

18 Salkeld, 33.

Illustration

Fig. 1; Initial D- Peasant (Adam) digging above scenes of Purgatory and Hell.
Hugo Ripelin von StraRburg, Compendium Theologicae Veritati's, Book 3, Fol.
64va. Wurzburg Universitatis Bibliothek, Cod. M. ch. F, 690.

PICCIOTTO/ 19

AN INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL BERTRAND MONK
CONDUCTED BY MICHAEL OSMAN,
ZEYNEP gELIK, AND LUCIA ALLAIS

In his recent book. An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of
Architecture and the Palestine Conflict {Durham: Duke University
Press, 20021, Daniel Monk analyzes the history of the use of archi-
tecture as a rhetorical device by the "political actors" of the
Palestine/Israel conflict to construct political "immediacy. " In other
words. Monk explores how monuments have been used as pivots in
a narrative to form an understandable, yet invisible, line of cause and
effect. Monk is the first historian to break the conflict into the con-
stituent parts which have come to represent it. He shows that as the
participants and observers of the conflict make use of these seem-
ingly concrete objects for justification or make use of them for clar-
ification, the conflict becomes— paradoxically— more abstract. The
very nature of a conflict over territory, political autonomy, and
national borders in what is called the "Holy Land" lends itself to the
denial of liability and to the perpetuation of the conflict itself. As
such, this book is the narrative of a prehistory taken for granted in
most other histories of contested sites. In this interview with Daniel
Monk on November 17, 2002, he discussed how, throughout the
history of the conflict, religion has, under various pretexts, helped to
render claims for territory and monuments irrefutable.

Could you set your book in a critical, personal, and histori-
ographical context for us?

It would be fair to say that An Aestfietic Occupation is real-
ly a repudiation of my own earlier efforts to explain the rela-
tion between monuments and mass violence in the context
of the Middle East conflict. In the first instance, this book
is a history of the normative understanding of the relation
between architecture and politics, and as such, of my own
prior beliefs. This normative explanation is one of immedia-
cy, of a presumption that it is possible to point to architec-
ture and to see a political reality at work in it. ..directly and
without mediation. More specifically, throughout the mod-
ern history of this conflict, political actors and interpreters
of this struggle have pointed to architecture each time they
felt compelled to explain the cause of a mass violence they

privilege as historically transformative. Here, architecture
confirms two reciprocal theories of historical change, two
seemingly opposed accounts that are. In reality, only one:
shrines and holy sites either confirm an incited violence, or
conversely, they ratify an organic, spontaneous, violence —
i.e., a violence triggered by the disruption of a transitive
relation between people and shrines.

What I have tried to do, then, is to write a history of these
reciprocal positions with the purpose of estranging them
and, more importantly, with the hope of showing how the
unitary vision of history that gives rise to them is untenable.
Which is not to suggest that I think that monuments have
no relation to politics; rather, I am concerned with the poli-
tics disclosed by a struggle's repeated efforts to assert a
relation of immediacy between architecture and history,
since there what one stumbles over is this conflict's nor-
malized incapacity to account for itself. To take matters
even further: if I suggest that this normalized incapacity of
a conflict to account for itself could be described as a "col-
lusive communicative framework" — that is, a tacit consen-
sus at the heart of a struggle — it is in order to ask what
might be disclosed about history itself in a context where
the dramaturgical organization of political experience intro-
duces itself as an absolute, as a structural abstraction.

Would it be possible for us, then, to define architectural
modernism in general as a belief in immediacy?

Maybe. In the sense that after Hegel unpacks the Pandora's
box — that is, advances methodically through the universali-
ty of mediation — a huge effort to re-identify the concrete
with the immediate would be expended in subsequent
philosophies and architectural theories. I am talking about
the demand for a return to quasi-"phrenological" thinking.

20 -HONK

but In ways that are cognizant of the fact that this demand
has Itself been subjected to philosophical reflection on Its
historical status, that Is, to critique. This Is why I believe
there is a significant quotient of voodoo in modernist archi-
tecture and architectural thought: a mysticism that cannot
be explained away — as some have done — by recourse to
arguments for a lag between technological advances and
social organization, or worse, to the fiction of a tectonic
rationality emerging out of a romanticism eventually shed,
like the hangovers of another era.

But let me contrast European High Modernism with
Palestine, since this pairing is actually instructive vis-a-vis
the triumph of modernism. If one looks to the example of
the Neue Sachlichkeit, for example. It Is evident that In
Weimar Germany the public as a whole was relatively
unaware of, felt indifferent to, or was downright suspicious
of Intellectuals' claims concerning art and architecture's
immediacy to politics. (Walter Benjamin famously described
the Neue Sachlichkeit as a bluff, suggesting that Its claims
to immediacy were much like the Baron Munchausen's
assertion that he pulled himself out of the bog by his own
hair). In this sense, high modernism is wimpy If judged by
the criterion of Its demand for a "phrenological" formal pol-
itics In the context of universal mediation.

By contrast, what Is so striking about the Interpretation of
architecture In the political history of Israel/Palestine Is that
participants In and observers of this struggle assumed the
monument's adequacy to history to be self-evident. Though
cognizant of the problems of representation, Ideology, medi-
ation...they nevertheless advance arguments concerning
the nature of architecture's adequacy to politics. In their
modernism, the proximate relation of architecture to actual-
ity is so complete that it explains history, requiring no his-
torical explanation. (There are really good historical reasons
for this, as I try to show In the book. I discuss political
actors whose intellectual projects necessarily began with
the demystlflcatlon of religious Invocations of the "con-
crete" in order to advance secular, political demands for
architecture's identification with the history for which It
nominally stands). Pointing beyond the arguments for mod-
ernism In the Weimar claims for the concrete — which
emerged In the political opponents "mutually-assessed
mutual assessment" — ratifies an abstract actuality all the
more successfully. The Interpretation of a conflict became
a constitutive factor in its perpetuation.

What about the Cold War? Do you see that as an analogous
situation?

Absolutely. But the "strategic Interaction" of Cold War pol-
itics elucidates the points about modernism I've just raised.
In the case of the Cold War, two actors in opposition — and
their surrogates — arrived at a common thematlzatlon of real-
ity. This has been written about by deterrence theorists and
political scientists like Robert Jervis In his famous The Logic
of Images in International Relations, or Thomas Schelling in
his Strategy of Conflict, or Waltz In his Man, the State and
War. Viewed through the lens of Goffman's Strategic
Interaction — anoxhet classic of the era — one could say that
despite their important disagreements, these students of
politics (and I think they're really theorists of gestures)
advance a view in which states are performative entities
and subjects are strategic beings — strategic subjects/perfor-
mative states. But as unlikely as it may seem given the
commonly-held view that there is a direct correlation
between modernism and development, this kind of strategic
Interaction was already old-hat in the 1960s In Israel and
Palestine. In very specific ways, by 1967 It had been taken
to two levels of abstraction higher than the classic gestural
brinksmanship that one witnesses In U.S. /Soviet relations.
Let me add that I'm not unaware of the fact that the stakes
were obviously much higher In the Cuban missile crisis, for
example, than In the build up to the war of June 1967 In
the Middle East. But viewed in light of the categories of
political comportment advanced by the deterrence theory of
Its own time, what had been taking place in the Middle East
during its modern history far exceeded the "logic" to which
these thinkers tried to assign a name.

This advanced strategic comportment fascinates me, and I
guess this is why I find the question about the Cold War so
compelling; the relation is itself the focus of one of my cur-
rent research projects, which I think of as the continuation
of An Aesthetic Occupation. This book Is tentatively enti-
tled The Politics of Retrospection: Framing Middle East
History in the Aftermath of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
It looks at the Immediate aftereffects of the hostilities of
1967 and especially at the way political actors sought to
identify the causes of their new historical situation during a
period that would eventually come to be known as the "era
of euphoria" In Israel, and the "great setback" In the Arab
world. This Investigation builds on the methods of An
Aesthetic Occupation by chronicling how parties to this
conflict made sense of their opponents' attempts to make
sense of the causes of war. However, while the first volume
records the way political actors tried (without much suc-

MONK,' 21

cess) to postulate the political instrumentality of symbols
and images in explanations of violence, this work examines
a subsequent generation's efforts to locate the causes of
war in the se//-image of the peoples involved. (And more
specifically, in the self-image of political actors betrayed in
their own assessments of their opponent's self-image). If
this sounds abstract, it is because those involved in explain-
ing a new political reality actually advanced an abstract pol-
itics: from Sadiq al-'Azm's Self-Criticism After the Defeat,
to assessments of these assessments such as Yehoshafat
Harkabi's Arab Lessons From Their Defeat, to immanent cri-
tiques of the Israeli meta-critical position (like the young
Edward Said's "The Arab Portrayed"), arguments implicat-
ing the self-image of one's opponent in the instigation of
violence advanced a new consensus concerning the nature
of historical change.

How does the idea of allegory come into play In your book?

I guess the short answer might be this; in the ways in which
the political actors themselves debate, theorize, and
advance arguments for the role of architecture in their own
political reality, they reveal a constitutive relation between
allegory and history. But this is a remarkably complex rela-
tion. Here, allegory is not merely taken to mean the con-
catenation of conventional symbols — the "extended sym-
bol" that would explain, for example, what is signified by
the features of the statue of Jose de San Martin's statue at
the entrance to Central Park: a sword up or a sword down,
a horse rearing or with its head bent down, the hero touch-
ing his cap, and looking to the east or west, etc. Rather,
what I'm exploring in An Aesthetic Occupation is a relation
to allegory far less estranged from collective experience
than the one I've just described; the way in which the polit-
ical actors whose adventures I tell understand and advance
their own understanding of their own historical circum-
stances discloses itself as having a concrete relationship to
time that is the same as the one we have come to describe
in allegory. In a tradition of thinking originating in Georg
Lukacs and elaborated in Walter Benjamin's philosophy of
history that sees allegory first, as a charnell-house of long-
rotted inferiorities, and then, as the via negativa to revolu-
tionary experience, it is a cipher language of history. ("From
the standpoint of death, the product of the corpse is life,"
Benjamin instructs the reader of his Trauerspiel study).

In the conclusion of your book you make a strong claim
about ethics. Could you expand upon It?

First, let me say that the conclusion of An Aesthetic
Occupation is a work of self-criticism. (I should add that this

is a critique that is much harsher than any of the reviews of
this book I've read to date). But I am not in any sense offer-
ing this gesture of self-criticism as a pragmatic model for an
ethics. This is not a book that suggests that the identifica-
tion of a problem is a step in its resolution. Instead, like oth-
ers before me, I'm suggesting that critique is its own end.
And critique of a particular kind: a critique that is inherent-
ly negative in its orientation, in the sense that it displays
"intransigence towards all reification" — as Adorno once
described the task of his own negative dialectics. Such
intransigence does not only extend to assertions that histo-
ry fulfills itself in stone, but also to claims concerning the
successful and complete demystification of such assertions.
The ethical imperative I raise lies precisely in An Aesthetic
Occupation's own unfinished business. If in this work I sug-
gest that the claim of architecture's political immediacy sig-
nals the violent success of an impossible understanding of
history-as-reconciled-existence, then far more important
would be to show that the possibility of, and the legitimate
demand for, a reconciled existence survives in our failure to
articulate the impossibility of reconciliation in this one.

Could you speak a little about the structure of your book?
Why do you move from "stone," to "tile," to "paper," and
to "celluloid?" Are you suggesting "the march of the world
spirit?"

Well, I am suggesting a kind of progression, but I am not in
any sense suggesting that it coincides with the "march of
the world spirit." If I trace how modes of historical self-
presentation advanced towards greater complexity of
abstraction, it is not with the aim of implying a drive
towards ever greater universality. This is the case in the
Phenomenology, which culminates with Spirit's self-cog-
nizance as Absolute Knowing, or in subsequent materialist
versions that posited the completion of thought in the pro-
letariat's self-cognizance as the subject/object of History.
The dynamic I present corresponds with something closer
to an effort to "keep up appearances" in the face of repeat-
ed challenges to those whose political task is to "keep up
appearances". ..i.e., to articulate the relation between
"facts" on the ground and facts "on the ground." In histor-
ical terms, "stone," "tile," "paper," and so on are just short-
hand terms for that process.

The book begins with a history of the argument that holy
sites are instantiations of revelation. The portion called
"stone" documents how this position was eclipsed by
another that emerged precisely in expressions of skepticism
concerning the first. In the critique of the adequacy of mon-

22 .'MONK

uments to history advanced in religious devotion, a belief in
the adequacy of architecture to history was sustained all
along. ..in the assertion that in their "untruth" as authentic
holy sites they are true instantiations of secular realpolitik.
There are corresponding claims in "Tile" — that the true state
of affairs could be discerned by the way one's opponents
used architecture— that is, treated it as the covering image
for their own political imperatives. So, we pass from a mag-
ical theory of adequation to an operative one. After the riots
that took place in Palestine in 1929, this tenuous, but nor-
mative understanding of the relation of architecture to poli-
tics also collapsed. Now, parties to this conflict would
argue that history presents itself directly in the untruth of
one's opponents' claims for the uses of monuments. This is
why, in the section entitled "Paper," I present the history of
the arguments advanced by representatives for the Zionist
and Palestinian leadership before a Parliamentary commis-
sion of inquiry on the causes of the violence of 1929. By
this point, parties to this conflict resort to a remarkable
argument: "history inheres in the way that that guy says I
use monuments." They point to actual pictures of shrines in
order to make this case. If I suggest that this is a movement
towards abstraction, it is because I think it is incumbent
upon us to ask: what is the character of a history in which
political leaders, arguing for the very possibility of their con-
stituents' existence in a country, find themselves obligated
to theorize about what pictures mean? How do they find
themselves resorting to a kind of art criticism? While many
political histories have normalized this question into oblivion
by treating the images as "propaganda" — that is, as merely
contingent upon a political imperative taking place less
abstractly elsewhere — I focus instead on the fact that
nobody has been able to articulate what those larger politi-
cal imperatives are without resorting to these precise claims
for the immediacy of architecture to history — this time, as
something utterly contingent upon a politics it is supposed
to name.

What can you tell us about your current work? How does it
relate to the themes found in this book?

An Aesthetic Occupation connects with a crucial moment in
the history of the gesture. I wasn't completely aware of this
as I was writing it. In another of the projects I'm currently
developing, I am trying to present the history of the gesture
in a novel way informed by what I've learned so far: that is,
tracing the history of the gesture by examining the episte-
mological frameworks in which it presented itself as an
urgent problem. I start with Winkelmann and Lessing who
were asking themselves whether some poor sculpture was

suffering its pain in calm repose or not, since for them the
possibility of a modern theory of expression would be con-
tingent upon the answer. Following romantic theories of
sentimentality to the origins of modern psychology, I con-
nect these (by virtue of their subsequent rejection of psy-
chological "parallelism") to the sociology of Herbert Mead
and his notion of "symbolic interaction." It is a short step
from here to the modern politics of the Cold War and to the
issues we discussed a little while ago, by which political
actors expended huge intellectual efforts to arrive at a reli-
able understanding of gesture. Combining Mead's notion of
a "conversation of gestures" with Charles Sanders Peirce's
pragmaticist understanding of language, political scientists
would attempt to find a way to arrive at a "taxonomy"
capable of distinguishing between "phony" and "real" ges-
tures (they called the former signals and the latter indexes).
The critique of this kind of "taxonomy" was advanced by
Erving Goffman, who, in treating the dramaturgy of such
gestures , rejected the implicit claims of symbolic interac-
tions concerning the "uses" of images in political experi-
ence. He suggested instead that the belief in uses was itself
a gesture of agency. In An Aesthetic Occupation, I did not
know that I was looking at a part of this history, but I'm
quite eager to pursue it.

So what relationships have you been finding between aes-
thetics and politics in your current research?

For the last number of years, I've been looking at the aes-
thetics implicit in practical political life, particularly the the-
ories of figuration presupposed in modern politics. When I
open a work of political science, I often discover that impor-
tant and credible theories of politics hold presumptions con-
cerning representation that were abandoned at the end of
the eighteenth century by credible students of aesthetics. I
don't say this to indict them, but to suggest that I've been
trying to understand the epistemological horizons of politi-
cal actors and their interpreters. At the same time, as cir-
cumstances have led me to delve deeply into politics and
political thought, I have the uncomfortable sense that the
humanities have all too often relied on vulgar reductions of
politics, and more specifically, on conceptions of power as
an undifferentiated absolute. I am increasingly more curious
and skeptical about this tendency, as it has been advanced
in recent and current arguments about the way culture-
visual, material, etc.— constitutes a nexus of power. My
concern is that this identification of politics-qua-power may
signal, more than anything else, a way in which we pay trib-
ute to our own renunzciation and even extract a certain fris-
son from It.

HONK/ 23

Re/Lt'-TfP

?^|t'./^m..t/'^=^''

^^^^^^

V^

ii

3^^^

^Estate of Robert Smithson/Llcensed by VAGA, New York,

2^ /JONES

CAROLINE JONES
ININ6 THE LODE

The tongue

Did burst

Into a Bloody Word....

From a ruptured

Blood vessel

Comes a prayer

— Robert Smithson, "From the City," unpublished
poem, ca. 1960^

A degraded paradise is perhaps worse than a
degraded hell. America abounds in banal heavens,
in vapid "happy-hunting grounds," and in "natu-
ral" hells like Death Valley. ..or The Devil's
Playground.... The abysmal problem of gardens
somehow involves a fall from somewhere or
something. The certainty of the absolute garden
will never be regained.

— Robert Smithson, footnote to "A Sedimentation
of the Mind: Earth Projects," 1968 [RS 1131

Sifting through Smithson, one navigates stratigraphic lay-
ers. Not the least of which are the data files accumulating
over the years: his essays, the unpublished/now published
poetry, the reviews of other artists' works, the interviews.
Then, there are the chunkier layers: the collages, the crum-
pled sheets documenting unrealized projects, the slide-
shows in their battered cardboard mounts, the stashes of
Instamatic prints, the brittle photostats. The built earth-
works are just part of the palimpsest: crusting up again out
of the Great Salt Lake, or dropping back under the flow;
looming over the sand quarry at Sonsbeek or plowed under
by the administrators at Kent State. Although privileged by
art history, their stratigraphy is just part of the story; they
are crumbling, gone, or stubbornly resistant to the miner's
pick. The Smithson lode, like breccia, is an aggregate of the
organic and the inorganic, compounded materials dragged

from different times and places, annealed under intense
pressure. But, in his own words,

no materials are solid, they all contain caverns and
fissures.... Words and rocks contain a language
that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look
at any word long enough and you will see it open
up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles
each containing its own void. 2 |RS 107]

The fissures are crucial to our project of finding the spiritu-
al Smithson. That author-function will never be found
"intact," but always in the interstices of the aggregate,
threaded by gnosis and larded with doubt.

The archaeological and geological practices engaging the
Smithson reader/viewer are entirely appropriate, replicating
the activities of an artist/theorist for whom text was mate-
rial to be heaped, piled, accumulated, and pushed around.
"Earthwords," Smithson called Edgar Allan Poe's prescient
evocation of earthworks in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym of Nantucket, 1850:

Nothing worth mentioning occurred during the
next twenty-four hours, except that, in examining
the ground to the eastward third chasm, we found
two triangular holes of great depth, and also with
black granite sides. ^ IRS 1081

Words were as material as earth, and dirt as fluidly con-
structed as discourse. Regardless of what they signified for
Poe, triangular holes were one of the options for artists
Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Morris, and others
whose work Smithson illustrated and discussed. But
Smithson declined this ancient iconic form and the cubic

JONES/ 25

obsessions of Minimalism (the cube a vestige of late-mod-
ernism). For Smithson, it was the spiral, the labyrinth, and
the vortex that figured his desire.

...unlike those monuments of the past which
evolved out of the matrix of beliefs and religions
of their time, the Spiral Jetty came into existence
as the individual vision of a single artist.'*

Such market-driven fantasies of authorial integrity are
posthumous, imposed on a more complex author-function
emerging specifically as "Smithson" from the permeation of
individual intention by dispersed, communal, or aggregative
authorial functions. Larger social units fueled and produced
the mature work we nominate as "Smithsons:" road trips,
filmmaking, sample collecting, "jobbing out," delegated
photography, and even virtuosic bulldozer crews and aerial
surveys. Smithson was a culminating author, but only in the
Benjaminian sense of an author-as-producer, in this case, a
productive theorist of experience:

In June 1968, my wife Nancy, Virginia Dwan,
Dan Graham, and I visited the slate quarries in
Bangor-Ben Argyl, Pennsylvania. Banks of sus-
pended slate hung over a greenish-blue pond at
the bottom of a deep quarry. All boundaries and
distinctions lost their meaning in this ocean of
slate and collapsed all notions of gestalt unity.
The present fell forward and backward into a
tumult of "de-differentiation," to use Anton
Ehrenzweig's word for entropy.... How can one
contain this "oceanic" site?... The container is in
a sense a fragment itself, something that could be
called a three-dimensional map. Without appeal to
"gestalts" or "anti-form," it actually exists as a
fragment of a greater fragmentation. It is a three-
dimensional perspective that has broken away
from the whole, while containing the lack of its
own containment. IRS 1 10-1 1 1 1

Here, Smithson's spiral moved out, away from the ompha-
los of the sacrosanct studio, away from the city-system,
and, referentially, away from the gallery's white cube. The
Non-sites, in the gallery, and their dialectic with the Site, at
an absent, industrially disrupted periphery, held the art
world system tenuously in place, but only as a relay for
experience and concept, part of the "back-and-forth" that
interested Smithson.

The site is a place where a piece should be but
isn't. IRS 2501

As the idea for the Sprial Jetty look form, the art world sys-
tem became a discursive construct: "I'm not really discon-
tent. I'm just interested in exploring the apparatus I'm being
threaded through. "^ The spiral was the figure for that
threading: the spiraling of celluloid through the projector,
the spiraling of salt crystals in their molecular lattice, the
oral and aural "spiral ear" referenced in Brancusi's sketch of
James Joyce.

In my argument, the spirals began sensationally for
Smithson as stigmata — v\iormho\es between Enlightenment
rationality and the ancient symbolism of blood and passion,
violently shuttling the Catholic boy from his New Jersey
pew to the "Gothic" sensibilities of a million backyards. He
drew spirals on the feet of Christ, latticed like a spider's
web. These early drawings, exhibited in Smithson's first
one-man show in Rome, showed the spiral tunneling
inward, downward, into the body of the Christ, down to the
bedrock of crucifixion, uncertain and endlessly incompre-
hensible.

Art was never objectified during the Ages of
Faith; art was an "act" of worship. Icons would
never be "looked" at like a tourist looks at an
ob/et d'a/T... Jackson Pollock and other American
"action" painters have restored something of the
ritual life of art.... The rituals that Pollock discov-
ered in the Hopi religion and Navajo sand-painting
exist also in the outskirts of New York City.
Penitential fires are built on Halloween in the dim
regions of the suburbs, burning inside the rotting
Jack-0'Lantern with glowing hollow eyes, nose,
and mouth. 6 [RS 321 and 3231

As he did for so many other American artists, Pollock
seemed to show the way. "A chance comparison between
Georges Rouault and Pollock indicates 'inner' and 'outer'
obsessions between the European and the American." IRS
321] But the path between the spiral of the stigmata and
the spiral of the Jetty was itself elliptical, vortextual, and
full of self-fashioning moves. ^ Smithson's trip to Rome for
his first one-man show in 1961 was more determinative. It
turned the screw of a developing crystalline structure and
initiated the tropism toward geometry that would bracket
the oceanic and the spiritual (for a while):

At that time I really wasn't interested in doing
abstractions. I was actually interested in religion,
you know, and archetypal things, I guess inter-
ested in Europe.... William Burroughs' Nal<ed

26 /JONES

^Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

JONES/ 27

Lunch,... Mallarme and Gustave Moreau and that
kind of thing.... It all seemed to coincide in a curi-
ous kind of way. IRS 282]

The "facade of Catholicism" that obsessed Smithson at the
time wound itself into a picture of decadent sexuality and
confronted him In Rome with Its excessive display. The
facade parted to reveal baroque layers of corruption,
labyrinthine catacombs, and perverse desires. The spiral
became a worm within the body of the church; "a snake
chewing a penis" was Its homoerotic symptom. ^ Thus, a
dialectic formed between erotica and geometry character-
ized by Smithson's Immediate post-Rome production, a set
of exercises he described as "sort of like cartouches." Here,
homoeroticism was banished to the peripheries or bracket-
ed by geometric borders. In one telling cartouche, the
periphery is polymorphously sexuallzed, the center an erot-
ic vortex. Only the boundary is "pure," a crystalline set of
nested hexagons. Their segments are taken in sequence to
form a triangulated spiral that appears again in the first
"earthwork," an aerial sculpture commissioned for the run-
way bordering the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.

So my trip to Rome was sort of an encounter with
European history as a nightmare.... And the real
breakthrough came once I was able to overcome
this lurking pagan religious anthropomorphism. I
was able to get into crystalline structures in terms
of structures of matter and that sort of thing.... I
was doing crystalline type work and my early
interest in geology and earth sciences began to
assert Itself over the whole cultural overlay of
Europe. I had gotten that out of my system. (RS
283, 284, and 2861

Through the crystalline, the spiral could reassert itself. No
longer scandalously homoerotic, no longer simply eschato-
logical, no longer merely geometric, it knit these strata
together. Like magma flowing through the interstices of a
compacted situation, it crystallized as a boundary that
incorporated the fragments of its own violent passage
through the organic.

I mean I never really could believe In any kind of
redemptive situation. I was fascinated with
Gnostic heresies, Manicheism, [sic\ and the dual-
istic heresies of the East.... I guess there was a
tug of war going on between the organic and the
crystalline.... Actually, I think they kind of met — a
kind of dialectic occurred later on, so both areas
were resolved. IRS 286 and 290]

Smithson's early, unpublished poems are heart-rending —
remarkably, they remained unpublished, even through the
celebrity of the Spiral Jetty and its sudden precipitate, glob-
al fame. "Joining with the myth of the machine," he penned
around 1960, "The rebel / Expects to be damned by rust" —
dust unto dust became rust unto rust as his spiral took the
binary of nature/technology and pulverized it.

You know, one pebble moving one foot in two
million years is enough action to keep me really
excited. But some of us have to simulate
upheaval, step up the action. Sometimes we have
to call on Bacchus. Excess. Madness. The End of
the World. Mass Carnage. Falling Empires. (RS
251)

Entropy became the engine of this final figuration, the archi-
tect of a final spiraling path. Its slow arc looked like Nature.
Was this the solution, a postmodern pastoral?

Nature is an infinite sphere, whose center is
everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
[Pascal, as quoted in RS 271

The solar system's slow swan song, the "heat death" of the
universe — an obsession of science in the 1960s, was only
one part of the spiral. The interstitial spirituality of Smithson
was equally dependent on the figure of technology — stud-
ded with rust and mechanical "dinosaurs," but sutured into
the very order of Nature. Technology, the artist claimed,
was part of "Human Nature." Thus, part of the dialectic's
resolution lay in the deep logic of the pastoral, in which the
flight from the marketplace is always necessarily indexed to
the market's genres and structures of value. The pastoral,
in turn, was inflated by a post-Apollo techno-scientific
gigantism, the sudden vision of an Earth suspended with its
veil of atmosphere in an inky infinite. In bounded chaos,
massive scale, and geological timeframes, Smithson found
the right optic from which to view the institutionalized reli-
gion that "haunted" — as he described it — his early work.

The refuse between mind and matter is a mine of
information. IRS 107]

Mining the lode will continue to churn the strata, yielding
further Smithsons from the spirals of compacted discourse.
Many of those nuggets can be turned to reveal a spiritual
sheen.

28 /JONES

Notes

1 Robert Smilhson, "From the Cilv," ca, 1960, published posthumously in
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 19961. 317. Hereinafter RS,

2 Smithson, "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," Art forum
(September 1968).

3 Edgar Allan Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. 1850,
Chapter XXIII, as quoted by Smithson in "Sedimentation,"

4 "Biographical Note," unsigned (but probably by the artist's widow, earthwork
artist Nancy Holt), in Robert Smithson, The Writings of Robert Smithson, edit-
ed by Nancy Holt, with an introduction by Philip Leider (New York: New York
University Press, 1979), 5.

5 Bruce Kurtz. "Conversation with Robert Smithson on April 22, 1972," The
Fox II (19751 in RS 262.

6 Smithson, "The Iconography of Desolation," c. 1962, remained unpublished
until long after his death. The first scholar to gain access to these unpublished
materials was Eugenie Tsai. who published this essay in Robert Smithson
Unearthed: Drawings, Collages. Writings (New York: Columbia University Press,
19911, 61-68.

7 This trajectory is laid out more fully in Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio:

Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), and most recently, m Caroline Jones, "Preconscious/Posthumous
Smithson: The Ambiguous Status of Art and Artist in the Postmodern Frame,"
Res 41 (Spring 20021.

8 Smithson references the Michelangelesque figure in the posthumously pub-
lished "What Really Spoils Michelangelo's Sculpture," Tsai, 1991, 73. The fig-
ure IS borrowed again in Smithson's cartouche drawing. Untitled (Second-Stage
Injector). 1963. See the essay "Preconscious/ Posthumous Smithson," supra,
The penis/snake spiral is taken from Michelangelo's skewering of his enemies in
the papal curia. The figure of Minos, Prince of Hades, in the lower right corner
of The Last Judgment, apparently bore an uncanny resemblance to
Michelangelo's enemy Biagio da Cesena, the master of ceremonies in the papal
court. Da Cesena had called the top half of the unfinished Judgment a "stufa
d'ignudi" when it was shown to intimates in 1 540.

Illustrations

Frg. 1: Robert Smithson. A Surd View for An Afternoor}, 1970.
Fig. 2: Robert Smithson, Feet of Christ, 1961

JONES/ 29

FERNANDO DOMEYKO

CHURCH AND COMMUNITY CENTER IN

LAS ERISAS DE SANTO DOMINGO. CHILE

30 /DOHEYKO

The temple is both subjective and objective. Its use is ulti-
mately internal to the visitor and its program is effective
silently and personally. The temple is also a dynamic repre-
sentation of society, not for aesthetic or historical reasons,
but rather, it acts as a mirror to the shifting attitudes of a
culture in a much more accurate and immediate manner
than other building types.

Though the tectonic elements of the Church at Las Brisas
are critical to understanding its realization, the design is ulti-
mately an investigation of the program — it seeks to clarify
the essence of a meditative act. The clarification here devel-

oped from a consideration of how elemental forces physi-
cally manifest, as one hopes to experience spiritual forces
through the act of meditation.

The church in Las Brisas de Santo Domingo moderates
these physical experiences to facilitate meditation. It is near
a forest of boldo trees, a native species with leaves tradi-
tionally used for making a purifying, healing potion. It lies in
the path of both the sun and the wind. These were tecton-
ic decisions which allow the visitor to feel the life of the
building and the larger set of relationships of which they are
a part.

DOMEYKO/ 31

The meditative aspects of the church were further clarified
through light — not through the manipulation of light, but
through the exploration of a specific kind of light. The inten-
tion was to harness a quality of light — like a memory and
the identification of memory — in order to create an environ-
ment conducive to reflection. Likewise, the collaboration
with Kurt Wagner from Bose allowed for an investigation of
sound as a bendable force, focused in the service of the
program. When people and music fill the space, the building
works as a musical instrument to enhance the experience
rather than dictate it.

The building process itself brought an illumination and dis-
covery only realizable through the act of construction, when
the forces of the bulding began to reveal themselves. In this
particular case, the crew embraced the spirit of the process.
Careful examination of craftsmanship became superfluous,
and the catalyst to action, "I don't need to watch you, God
watches you," seems to have taken on a collective under-
standing.

Ultimately, the goal was not to design, make, and construct
forms for their own sake, but rather to ensure that every
element of the building was "working." The whole building
then becomes activated and no element is on "vacation."
The austerity of the elements in action complements rather
than competes with the nature of the meditative experi-
ence.

To connect ideas and experiences, one must allow the
architectural elements to begin a dialogue. It is not what we
project or plan, but what we become — what we actually do
and make — and what we may ultimately learn from the dia-
logue that arises. The idea of meditation was here all the
time — a meditation through physics to open a way to God,
a happy God. The building is less about the architect than
what is best for the building as a work for God. This is a
spiritual attitude, but not a religious one. It allows the ulti-
mate meditative question to arise: "What kind of spirit
moves us?"

32 ,/DOnEYKO

1

k^^ _ '^fiii 1

DOMEYKO/ 33

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3') /APARICIO GUISADO

JESUS MARIA APARICIO GUISADO
CHURCH IN ANDALUSIA

The church is located on the outskirts of Cordoba in Spain
on an anonymous avenue with newly constructed
Mediterranean-style houses on one side, and a shopping
center on the other. Although the city has a rich cultural his-
tory, the site does not reveal it. Rather than orient the
church along the conventional east-west axis, we turned
the structure away from the built environment, and orient-

ed the altar and pulpit towards the south. The solitary view
from the church surveys a distant mountain range to the
north, passing over the immediate surroundings. The exte-
rior of the church emphasizes solidity, a defensive hermet-
ic seal against a setting without memorable references. This
solidity is achieved through the construction of pure vol-
umes.

APARICIO GUISADO/ 35

36 /APARICIO bUISADO

A large rectangular podium signifies the earth. It was con-
ceived as a base for the fall of a shadow, that of the church
Itself. The planes of the podium and of the church are held
apart by a lightweight, almost imperceptible structure; a
strip of light connects the two volumes and a shadow set-
tles between them.

Light, shadow, and color model the interior space of the
church. The upper plane of the podium is carved by the
light, and the space contained within the "floating" walls is
shaped by these three elements. The space is thus held
within the shadow of the strong light of the Andalusian sun.
A low light filters in from between the two volumes of
space, illuminating the interior evenly. The interior wall is
punctuated with colored light. Openings on the west wall
are painted red; on the east, blue; and the southern aper-
tures, where the altar is located, remain unpainted to retain
the natural yellow or white light. These colors will accentu-
ate the natural tones of the atmosphere at those hours
when light passes through them, following the passage of
the sun.

The color will play a role in the liturgy as well. On the east-
ern end of the southern wall, behind the altar, a niche holds
the figure of the Virgin of Hope. She is draped in green light,
the liturgical color of hope, and faces the morning sun. This
green results from a mixture of the blue from the east and
the natural yellow from the south and will change in hue
throughout the day. In the early morning, the niche will
become deep blue; as the sun moves throughout the day,
the yellow-white will intensify. A tabernacle situated on the
western corner will change from a yellow-orange in the
morning to red as the afternoon progresses.

The celebrant is seated on the podium alongside the altar,
or place of sacrifice, and the pulpit. The visual focus of the
service then becomes the natural light. Spaces carved into
the podium plane provide for specific sacraments; the wor-
shippers assemble on a lower plane to give emphasis to the
podium.

In order to support the large interior space designed to hold
about four hundred people, we constructed the main sanc-

<UCUlii fio?^ ^u

tuary with a prefabricated concrete "waffle-like" space-
frame structure. The frame lines the eastern and western
interior walls and the deep units of the frame provide
peripheral spaces of occupation; the frame also modulates
the interior shadows, fracturing the light from above and
below, casting shadows that move over the course of the
day.

Our proposal for the Church in Andalusia emphasizes the
expression of limits and the breaking of boundaries that
form these limits through light. The church is divided into
spaces of transition where we are able to pass from one
spatial reality to another. This space of shade in Andalusia
provides a refuge from the Mediterranean sun, yet registers
the passing of time and the changes of the day for those
inhabiting the shadows in quietude and prayer.

APARICIO GUISADO/ 37

38 /JARZOMBEK

MARK JARZOFIBEK

BELLOTTO'S DRESDEN:
FRAMING THE DIALECTICS OF PORCELAIN

In 1978, pieces from Dresden's famous art and porcelain
collections went on exhibition in Washington D.C., New
York, and San FranciscoJ The backdrop of the exhibition
was, of course, the devastating fire bombing of Dresden by
the Allies in World War II, and the subsequent consolidation
of East Germany into a socialist state. In all candor,
Manfred Bachmann, Director of the State Art Collections in
Dresden, wrote in the accompanying catalogue that the
Dresden collections were "in the hands of the working
class" whose "socially-oriented policies... have created new
museums in the framework of the reconstructed cultural
centers of the city on the Elbe. "2 The Splendors of Dresden,
as the exhibition was called, was heavily funded by the IBM
Corporation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and
was thus a victory for the champions of detente. Though
Bachmann meant for the "reconstructed cultural centers" to
point to the much-anticipated transformation of Dresden
into a modernized city, he also referred to the attempt to
rebuild the heavily-damaged Zwinger and Semper Galleries.
In fact, one of the purposes of the exhibition was to draw
attention to the desires of both the East and West for a re-
energized museum culture. For this reason, the exhibition
was staged as part of the opening celebration of I.M. Pel's
new East Wing of the National Gallery. To make the theme
of renewal even stronger, the exhibition included a true-to-
scale reconstruction of the interior of one of Dresden's most
noted exhibition spaces, the "Green Vault," a fortified, six-
teenth-century treasure room where Dresden's former
monarchical rulers housed the most precious pieces of their
porcelain collection. In reality, the Green Vault, which had
been heavily damaged during World War II, was not in use
and the plans for its restoration were sketchy at best. It
was therefore not without some degree of irony that the
simulated version of what Dresdeners might very much

have wanted to see restored was on display in a building
that was far more expressive of modernist ideals than what
was then being built in East Germany.

The East German curators who authored the catalogue
availed themselves of this opportunity to construct within
the framework of the show a condensed history lesson
about the city of Dresden, a lesson designed as a play on
the theme of the East-West exchange. Its articulation began
with the first piece described in the catalogue in an essay
by Joachim Menzhausen, director of the Green Vault:
Bernard Bellotto's Dresden from tfie Right Bank of the Elbe,
1748 (Fig. 2). Painted, according to Menzhausen, in a "sci-
entifically exact" manner, it shows the city before the
"bombardment. "3 The bombardment to which the catalogue
refers was, however, not that which took place in 1945,
but rather the cannonade of 1 760 that took place during the
Seven Years' War (1756-1763). This war, a world war in
Its own right, involved all the major European powers and
had even spilled over into India and the Americas. Though
this paper cannot explore the history of this complicated
war, suffice it to say that in 1760, Dresden experienced
what local historians still call its "first destruction." To
show the devastation, the East German curators pointed to
another painting by Bellotto, his Kreuzkirche (Church of the
Holy Cross, 1765) (Fig. 1|. The catalogue's author noted
that the church's ruins, "like an open corpse, offer a strong
image of the desolation wrought by war.""*

Menzhausen was assuming that sophisticated readers
would see the parallel between the Kreuzkirche and the
Frauenkirche. Following the bombardment of 1945 by the
Allied forces, the Frauenkirche was left in a state of ruin
uncannily similar to that of the near-by Kreuzkirche as

JARZOMBEK/ 39

Bellotto had painted it. The two buildings represented noth-
ing less than the dynamic of Dresden's dialectical fate. The
Kreuzkirche signified the end of the monarchical world, the
Frauenkirche, the end of the bourgeois world. But if the first
step of the Dialectic can now be demonstrated only with
the help of art history and with the help of an image of "for-
tunate perfection," as Bellotto's painting was described by
Menzhausen, the result of the second step of the Dialectic,
namely the destruction of the Frauenkirche, had been
planned as a permanent visual element in the urban land-
scape. One should "never lose sight of this apocalyptic pic-
ture of our city," read a socialist brochure published just
after the war.^ The ruins remained until the mid-1990s,
when reconstruction of the Frauenkirche was begun. Until
then, it was an anti-memorial to fascism and, by the 1970s,
to the cruelty of the allied attack.

view, a mere "romantic chinoisene" of buildings. 6 The use
of these words by the director of the Green Vault to
describe Dresden's much admired urban silhouette was par-
ticularly biting since socialists, one must recall, saw chi-
noiserie as a manifestation of the fetishized and alienated
life-style of the upper classes. Dresden had been a world
center for porcelain products, playful figurines, made in
near-by Meissen; they were meant to be collected only
(Figs. 3 & 4). Indeed, Dresden's famous ruler, Augustus the
Strong (1670-1733), had assembled a collection of over
24,000 pieces of Chinese and Japanese porcelain for his
"Japanese Palace" (Fig. 5). Bellotto's Dresden from the
Right Bank of the Elbe, seen in this context, thus shows us
more than just a beautiful city. It is a painting of architec-
turally scaled chinoiserie, meaning that it was, in the final
analysis, as Menzhausen notes, a "symbol for an end."'

To flesh out the logic of Dresden's dialectically charged
fate, Menzhausen hinted that the initial attack in 1760 was
not unexpected, given that the city had become, in his

In positing the fate of Dresden's destruction within the fab-
ric of its monarchical history, the curators were generously
deflecting attention from the question of the Allies' guilt for

40 /JARZOMBEK

bombing Dresden. In exchange, the West would have to
accept the proposition that Dresden's post-war socialist
identity was not something imposed on it by the Russians,
but was a logical and internal resolution of its fate. Its
destruction was, in a sense, self-proclaimed. This meant
that by going to the exhibition and walking through the
space of the simulated "Green Vault," Westeners were, in
essence, revisiting the pre-dialectical moment of Dresden's
history.

But in the process of developing this piece of revisionist
diplomacy, the exhibition designers laid an elegant trap for
their Western audience, for chinoiserie had certainly not lost

its potency. The Westerners, therefore, were unknowingly,
taking in the sweet poison of the Vault's display, and, in
admiring it, became unwittingly complicit in their own undo-
ing.

The exhibition thus worked on two levels, one abstract and
timeless, the other, real and in the "here and now." Both
positioned the narrative of modernity and its "arrival"
through the sliding gradations of a precisely calibrated spa-
tio-temporal logic that moved not only between the Green
Vault and the East Wing, but also between the tropes of
death and destruction. It began with the lively little figurines
that had once so effectively foreshadowed Dresden's doom
but that now, dusted off, were harbingers of an even
grander purpose, a purpose that could be easily disguised
under the pretext of an East-West dialogue. The paintings
by Bellotto that framed the entire operation, the "before"
and the "after" images of the first instantiation of Dresden's
Dialectic, were part of the coded prediction of the West's
own demise and potential transcendence. Though the poi-
son and the warning labels were in plain view, they could
not be deciphered.

However, it was probably all a game which only the Eastern
curators could really enjoy. But it was also, no doubt, mixed
with sadness, as the Dresden curators, with deteriorating
state funding, were neither able to rebuild their Vault to its
former splendor nor build a new, modern museum similar to
the East Wing. The Western exhibition viewers had both the
funding and the building which was why the best that the
East German curators could get out of their "Green Vault"
was a trompe-l'oei/ of the historical Dialectic.

JARZOHBEK,' 41

Notes

1 The Splendor of Dresden: Five Centunes of Art Collecting, an Exhibition from
the German Democratic Republic was displayed at the National Gallery in
Washington from June 1 to September 4, 1978. More than 700 paintings,
drawings, prints, porcelains, scientific instruments, arms and armor, bronzes,
and jeweled objects were on view. Sent from the collections of Dresden, the
exhibit documented the history of art collecting by the rulers of Saxony over a
BOO-year period. It was organized by the National Gallery in Washington D.C..
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,
and It was curated by American and German experts, in particular by Olga
Raggio, chairman of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

2 Manfred Bachmann, "Statement," The Splendor of Dresden: Five Centuries of
Art Collecting (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978), 7. Bachmann
was the Director General of the State Art Collections in Dresden.

3 Joachim Menzhausen, "Five Centunes of Art Collecting in Dresden," The
Splendor of Dresden, 24. Menzhausen was the director of the Green Vault in
Dresden. The Venetian Bernardo Bellotto (1721-80) was the nephew and pupil
of the famous Canaletto. In 1747, he left Venice for Dresden where he was
appointed court painter to Frederick Augustus II of Saxony. Bellotto moved to
Warsaw in 1767. His best work was done in Dresden where he painted numer-
ous scenes of the city.

4 Angelo Walther, The Splendor of Dresden, 70.

5 "Was fanden wir?" Kultureller Neuaufbau Dresdens 1 (Dresden: Stadt
Dresden, n.d.l, 3.

6 Menzhausen, The Splendor of Dresden. 24.

7 Ibid.

Illustrations

From the catalogue for the exhibition, The Splendor of Dresden: Five Centuries
of Art Collecting: An Exhibition from the State Art Collections of Dresden (New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978).

Fig. 1 : Bernard Bellotto, Rums of the Church of the Holy Cross. 1 765, cat. no,
10,

Fig, 2: Bernard Bellotto, Dresden from the Right Bank of the Elbe, 1748, cat.
no. 5.

Fig. 3: Mother Monkey with her Young, Meissen, c. 1730, cat. no. 480,
Fig, 4: Teapot and Two Teabowls with Saucers, with strapwork painted in sil-
ver. Meissen, c. 1715-1720, cat, no, 473,
Fig, 5, Lady with Bird on a Perch, China, Te-hua, c. 1675-1725, cat. no. 362.

^2 /JARZOMBEK

THE

JONATHAN COONEY
CREATING SACRED SPACE OUTDOORS:
PRIMITIVE METHODIST CAMP MEETING IN

ENGLAND, 1819-1840*

It was the Loughborough, England Methodist circuit camp
meeting of July 30, 1820, and George Jarrat was describ-
ing a battle between two "mighty powers" for Primitive
Methodist Magazine. ^ Jarrat was struck by the similarity of
the scene to a military operation. The officers in the field
had been unable to call the troops to regroup. Not even the
sound of a horn had restored order. The camp meeting had
begun as usual; several short sermons followed by the
dividing of the crowd into "praying companies," in which
seekers of salvation could find encouragement, and perhaps
liberty, from their miserable spiritual condition. But when it
came time for the prayer companies to turn their attention
once more to the preachers, the leaders discovered that nei-
ther human voice nor trumpet could disengage the smaller
groups:

In one of the prayer companies, the cries of the
penitents were so affecting to the praying souls
that to attempt to persuade either the one or the
other to attend preaching was unavailing. At
length, we succeeded in removing the souls in dis-
tress, to the distance of about one hundred yards
from the preaching stand; and great numbers
repaired with them. 2

When Jarrat left the campground at eight o'clock that
evening, "many were still in distress. "3 Multiple preaching
stands had been set up, each stand boasting five sermons
in both the morning and the afternoon and two in the
evening. With the accompanying prayer services, it was dif-
ficult to know just how many people received salvation that
day, although Jarrat estimated that at least seven thousand
were present.*

An offshoot of Wesleyan Methodism, the Primitive
Methodists argued that the camp meeting — a one-day out-
door revival service — was an effective means of bringing
the Gospel to as many people as possible. The camp meet-
ing was invented on the American frontier, where it lasted
several days and was associated with enthusiasm and dis-
order. English camp meetings lasted only one day instead of
several days and emphasized prayer rather than preaching.
The Primitive Methodists' camp meetings in open fields
made it possible for the Movement to claim sacred space,
as the Methodists had been excluded from conventional
sacred space, first by the established Church, as had all
Methodists, and then by the Wesleyan Methodist adminis-
tration which sought a higher socio-political status.

For the Primitive Methodists, camp meetings became the
characteristic means of transmitting the substance of evan-
gelical religion, though regular chapel services became part
of their ministry. Known as "Ranters," the Primitive
Methodists became a sect and later a denomination. They
were "not only small but also homogeneous," drawing their
audiences primarily, but by no means exclusively, from the
poor, mostly farm laborers between 1820 and 1840 — the
"heroic age" of Primitive Methodist missionary expansion in
England. s Class differences and the stresses of industrial-
ization certainly contributed to the popularity of the
Primitive Methodists. National and international tensions
encouraged thousands of English men and women to seek
out the emotional and spiritual release of the camp meet-
ings. Gradually, however. Primitive Methodism surrendered
the enthusiasm of the spiritual battlefield for more staid and
socially acceptable forms of public worship. By the mid-
nineteenth century. Primitive Methodists were part of a
chapel-based movement, and by the early twentieth centu-

COONEY/ 13

ry, they had reconciled with their Wesleyan forebears. The
transition from sect to denomination and from worshipping
out-of-doors to Indoors suggests a familiar pattern of move-
ment from exclusion to inclusion and from the social and
religious margins to the mainstream.

The first formal attempt to marginalize the Primitive
Methodists occurred in 1807, when the Wesleyan confer-
ence forbade camp meetings:

Q. What Is the judgment of the Conference con-
cerning what are called camp-meetings?

A. It IS our judgment, that even supposing such
meetings to be allowable In America, they are
highly Improper in England, and likely to be pro-
ductive of considerable mischief and we disclaim
all connexion with them. 6

The power and efficacy of the camp meetings were clearly
evident to Hugh Bourne, however, and his enthusiasm for
them cost him his place in the old order. In June 1808,
Bourne was removed from membership In the Methodist
church for preaching to large crowds at organized camp
meetings. Hugh and his brother, James, were convinced
that worship in the open air was "both methodistical and
scriptural," and thus, solidly within the biblical and
Wesleyan traditions.^ Hugh Bourne argued that camp meet-
ings had an ameliorating effect when scheduled to coincide
with parish wakes — bawdy, secular feasts held annually In
some communities. He believed that more souls were con-
verted at camp meetings than through all the regular work
done on any particular preaching circuit In any given year.
His plan was to limit the length of sermons, using the
preaching event as a prelude to a period of intense group
prayer. He was sure that organizing camp meetings around
a variety of activities — preaching, praying, reading from tes-
timonies, etc. — enabled people "to continue the active wor-
ship of God, for a course of time, with energy and effect. "8

In the summer of 1 808, after the judgment prohibiting camp
meetings, there was an outdoor gathering at Norton, which
lasted several days. It was so successful that Bourne felt,
"the English camp-meetings were established on an Immov-
able foundation, and could never afterwards be shaken. "9
Bourne's movement took on the name Primitive Methodist
because "It had been directed towards the revival of primi-
tive or early Methodism by a return to the spirit and meth-
ods, especially in the matter of out-door preaching, of

Wesley and his coadjutors."'"' The name was officially
adopted In 1812. By 1820, the Primitives claimed 7,842
members, but by 1850, they boasted 102,222 members,
nearly one-third that of the Wesleyans' 334,458.'^

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Movement In
England, adopted "field preaching" as a form of mass evan-
gelism as early as 1 739, when he discovered that his col-
league, George Whitefield, was experiencing great success
holding services in the open air. Wesley was a product of
the rigid and orderly Church of England, an ordained priest
and the son and grandson of clergymen. Conducting public
worship anywhere but In churches and cathedrals dedicat-
ed to such activity seemed almost indecent to him, but
Wesley found he could also attract crowds out-of-doors,
and field preaching became characteristic of first-generation
Methodism. Field preaching brought the Gospel message to
the masses, who would not or could not attend holy serv-
ices in the established church. Just as Wesley himself was
shut out of many English pulpits because of his enthusiasm,
a rigid, formal, and politically-minded church that seemed to
care little for the working class alienated much of the pop-
ulation of England. 12

Decades later, as the Primitive Methodist ranks swelled
after a revived emphasis on field preaching and camp meet-
ings, England still struggled with class differences and
social discontent. Food shortages, postwar unemployment,
depressed wages, and soaring prices applied increasing
pressure to those least able to deal with it. The painfully
slow democratization process urged people to strive beyond
their social status while constant reminders of its inevitabil-
ity lingered. The presence of cholera In Leeds in 1832 may
have contributed to a tremendous increase in Primitive
Methodist membership there, and the disease was probably
responsible for adding 250 members to both the Hull and
North Shields circuits in just one quarter. The Primitive
Methodists in Liverpool gained over nine thousand members
in 1849 — the largest annual Increase In Primitive Methodist
history. It is no coincidence that Leeds also had high mor-
tality rates due to cholera by the end of the 1840s. ^^

While the appeal of the Primitive Methodists was not limit-
ed to the poor and the working classes, the leadership of
the original Wesleyan connection seemed to go out of its
way to exclude camp meetings and their adherents from
nineteenth-century mainstream Methodism. Jabez Bunting,
who emerged as the leader of Wesleyan Methodism from
the vacuum left by Wesley's death in 1791, tried to make

hk ,'COONEY

the growing denomination more respectable. Bunting, who
was solidly behind the conference's condemnation of camp
meetings, sought to relieve the political and financial pres-
sure that the connection was feeling from all sides. On the
one hand, groups like the Methodists were frequently
accused of being radicals and even subversives during
England's hostilities with France. As a religious movement
outside the established Church of England, they were in
danger of being shut down. On the other hand, money
raised within the connection for missionary enterprises had
been spent on keeping the Methodist Movement solvent in
England. Bunting came to "put his faith in a vision of
Methodism as a federation of chapels, serviced by a well-
instructed ministry and paid for by a pious and respectable
laity. "I''

As John Wesley was excluded from the establishment's
churches for his brand of enthusiasm, paradoxically, so
were Bourne and the Primitive Methodists alienated and
excluded by the attitudes and actions of the Wesleyan lead-
ership. While Bunting and others toiled to raise Methodism
to a level of financial privilege and social acceptability which
would ensure their vision of ministry, so did Bourne and his
associates find themselves creating their own sacred
spaces among the masses — the camp meeting.

Because the ordering of English society had long depended
on the squire-parson alliance, another characteristic of
Bourne's camp meetings should not escape notice: primitive
Methodist camp meetings emphasized ministry by the laity.
Although the preachers were most likely licensed clergy,
the great praying companies were made up of volunteer
laity. By 1820, strict guidelines for the organization and
implementation of the praying companies had been devel-
oped. Camp meeting conductors were charged to see that
preaching did not infringe on praying time when the con-
gregation could participate and minister. The prayer time
was a chance for those who had been "wounded," as Jarrat
observed, to be "saved" through preaching and so carried
with it significant importance. For a few years between
1816 and 1818, some Primitive Methodists experimented
with making preaching the focus of the camp meetings as
in America. The results were disastrous and demoralizing.
The praying companies were restored to prominence, and
the lay character of the Primitive Methodist ministry was re-
enforced. The established clergy had no part in these meet-
ings; the laity found and retained the spiritual role.'^

Other features of camp meetings in England involved the
laity's claim of control and space. One of these features
was the love feast, a testimonial meeting held in the
evening following the day's activities. In addition, ritual
marching marked the beginning of the camp meeting. The
meetings started with a march through the nearest village
or town. They moved from the staging area to the camp-
ground while drawing attention to the meeting itself. The
marching often began as early as six o'clock in the morning
and included singing and preaching along the way. In 1836,
a group in Stockport split and marched from opposite ends
of the town toward the central marketplace's The singing
and preaching drew both supporters and opposition, but the
general effect was more like a circus parade. The Primitive
Methodists, excluded from the established church and shut
out of the Wesleyan connection, found a way to storm
English society in a direct and physical manner, "through
the street, as a little army sounding for battle. "i'

The vigor of the Primitive Methodist camp meetings did not
last, however. Signs of change were evident by 1840, a
decade before Bourne's death, when the Primitive
Metliodist Magazine began to print articles about "Salvation
meetings," two-hour meetings on Sunday nights that
resembled camp meetings but could be held indoors and
during the winter. '8 After 1860, camp meetings "con-
tributed more to nostalgia than revivalism," and by 1900,
the Primitive Methodists had moved to a chapel-based min-
istry.'9 The low costs of Primitive Methodism — few debt-
ridden chapels and meager preachers' salaries — which may
have contributed to its popularity among the lower classes,
were gradually undone by the church's institutional drift
from its identity as a sect to its status as a denomination.
Chapel-building may indeed have drained the Primitive
Methodists' spiritual, as well as their financial resources. 2°

Primitive Methodists adopted the camp meeting from the
American Methodists who found it to be a useful tool for
evangelizing the frontier. But the Primitive Methodists were
uncomfortable with the raucous character of the American
version, which lasted several days and emphasized fervent
evangelical preaching, as correspondent Joshua Marsden
recounted for his English readers:

At six o'clock in the evening the horn summons to
preaching, after which, though in no unregulated
form, all the above means continue until morning;
so that go to whatever part of the camp you
please, some are engaged in them; yea, and dur-

cooNEY/ as

ing whatever part of the night you awake, the
wilderness is vocal with praise. 21

In America, the Primitive Methodists benefited from expan-
sion west into millions of acres of uncharted space; they
claimed sacred space in concordance with the expansion
movement, which particularly suited the camp meetings.
However, the democratization process was well underway
by the time camp meetings became popular in America. The
voluntary ministering was as evident in America as in
England, but in America, participation in all aspects of the
services was voluntary, and by the early nineteenth centu-
ry, personal expressions of spirituality were the norm.
Unlike the Wesleyan connection in England, mainstream
American Methodists embraced camp meetings. Camp
meetings became standard in American Methodism, but did
not become the chief hallmark of the Movement as it did
with Primitive Methodism in England. 22 There were other
differences:

First, [American] Methodism's most explosive
period of growth came before the advent of the
camp meeting; the Movement's basic structure
was already well established before camp meet-
ings emerged at the turn of the century. Second,
large and enthusiastic meetings were a familiar
and consistent component of the Methodist
Movement throughout the new nation, not only
on the frontier. 23

Hugh Bourne encouraged "conversation preaching," or per-
sonal witnessing, as another way in which the laity could
engage in spreading the Gospel message. Most scholars of
the Wesleyan heritage today recognize that one-on-one con-
tact and ministry within small groups did as much or more
to fuel the Methodist Movement as the large-scale opera-
tions that were the camp meetings. "Contrary to some
impressions," writes Richard Heitzenrater, "most of the
occasions when persons 'received' remission of sins or
were 'comforted' were those small group meetings, not the
large open-air preaching services. "2*

A familiar pattern emerged, however, as the Primitive
Methodists enjoyed several decades of phenomenal growth
followed by a plateau and decline as they moved away from
the very customs which defined their earliest efforts. Nearly
twenty years after Jarrat described the Loughborough camp
meeting with militaristic overtones in the Primitive
IVIethodist Magazine, another observer of the camp meet-
ings in 1839, described them as possessing "a regularity

which. ..could not have been accomplished, except by mili-
tary practice. "25 Regardless of whether the camp meetings
were primarily responsible for the growth of the Primitive
Methodists, they served as the battlefield on which many
Primitive Methodists fought. The recurring use of the bat-
tlefield analogy to describe the camp meetings evoked
images of vitality, but also drew into focus the tension of
the outsider. Open-air preaching was the sacred space they
claimed when they could not afford to construct chapels
and believed that the mother church had abandoned one of
the most sacred spaces of all — "God's own chapel" — and
with it a considerable portion of the English populace.

* For Shelby.

Notes

1 George Jarrat. "Loughborough Circuit Camp Meeting," Primitive Methodist
Magazine (18201: 241.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid, 241-242. A mourner was a person convicted of a sin who had not yet
received assurance of salvation. "When sinners, who were listening to the
word, felt the arrows of the Almighty stick fast within them, they repaired to
the multitude who were praying with the penitents. And so great an effect
attended the preaching, and the other praying services, that mourners contin-
ued to flock to the praying multitude, in regular succession, as wounded men
to an hospital; where numbers found the heating balm of the Redeemer's blood
to heal their souls."

4 Ibid.

5 James Obelkevich. Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey (1825-187BI
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 220.

6 "History of the Primitive Methodists," Primitive Methodist Magazine (1821):
51.

7 Ibid., 52, 76.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibrd., 54.

10 Joseph Ritson, The Romance of Primitive Methodism (London; Primitive
Methodist Publishing House. 1909), 96.

1 1 Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers:
Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles Since 1700 (Oxford; Clarendon
Press, 1977), 140-141.

1 2 Richard P. Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodists (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1995), 98.

13 Julia Stewart Werner, The Primitive Methodist Connexion: Its Background
and Early History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 19841, 17, 85.

14 David Hempton, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion
c. r 750-/500 (London: Routledge, 1996), 7, 107,

1 5 "On the Progress of Tunstall Circuit," Primitive Methodist Magazine (August

i|6 /COONEY

1820; Intended as a Substitute for October, 1819): 228-229.

16 J. Bowes. "Work of God in the Keigfiley Circuit," The Primitive Methodist
Magazine (1827): 29. Samuel Smitfi, "Stockport Camp Meeting," The Primitive
Methodist Magazine. New Senes (1836): 427-428.

17 Ibid.

18 "Salvation Meetings," The Primitive Methodist Magazine. New Series
(1839): 357-358.

19 Obelkevich. 253.

20 Ibid.. 222.

21 Josfiua Marsden. The Narrative of a Mission to Nova Scotia. New Brunsv\/ick
(1816): Quoted in "On the Mode of Conducting the Worship at the Camp-
Meetings in America, &c.," The Primitive Methodist Magazine (July 1, 1819):
150.

22 Obelkevich, 227. In spite of the dramatic accounts of English camp meet-
ings and the enthusiasm of the Primitive Methodist leadership for the technique.
Obelkevich plays down the significance of the camp meetings. "Despite the
notoriety of the camp meeting, it was at most, an occasional event and could
not have been the principal evangelistic technique even in the 1820s- By the
1850s, a single camp meeting was regularly scheduled for each village society
every year."

23 John H. Wigger, Talking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of
Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 96.

24 Heitzenrater, 100.

25 S. Smith, J. Lawley, and J, Cheetham, "Manchester Circuit General Camp
Meeting," The Primitive Methodist Magazine (1839): 359.

COONEY/ 47

as /ANDERSON

GLAIRE D. ANDERSON

THE CATHEDRAL IN

THE MOSQUE AND THE TWO PALACES:

ADDITIONS TO THE GREAT MOSQUE OF CORDOBA AND

THE ALHAMBRA DURING THE REIGN OF CHARLES V^

The conquest of al-Andalus, the Islamic-ruled portion of the
Iberian Peninsula, by the forces of the northern kingdom of
Castile began In the thirteenth century after nearly eight
hundred years of Islamic political dominance over the
Peninsula. Following the Castlllan conquest, or reconquista,
much of the architecture of al-Andalus, religious as well as
secular, was appropriated and used with few changes by
new Christian patrons. This paper focuses on sixteenth-cen-
tury additions to the two most famous Islamic monuments
of the Iberian Peninsula — the Great Mosque of Cordoba
(begun eighth century) and the Alhambra Citadel of Granada
(fourteenth century). The monuments are linked by changes
wrought during the reign of Charles V, who ruled as King of
Spain (r. 1516-56) and as Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1519-
56). The dialogue initiated by the juxtaposition of Charles'
amendments and the original medieval Islamic architectural
contexts invites an exploration of the circumstances in
which the projects were conceived and carried out.

Project One: The Cathedral in the Mosque

The Great Mosque of Cordoba was begun between 784 and
786 on the site of the VIsigothic church of S. Vicente,
which was likely preceded by a Roman temple (Fig. 2). The
Great Mosque was founded by the first Islamic ruler of the
Iberian Peninsula, 'Abd al-Rahman I, a member of the
Umayyad Dynasty of Syria. Scholars have noted how the
Mosque's prayer hall, with its seemingly Infinite rows of
spoliated columns and capitals surmounted by double arch-
es, fuses visual references to the transplanted dynasty's
Syrian Identity (the alternating red and white voussoirs for
instance) with local Roman and Late Antique materials and
techniques (particularly the horseshoe arch) (Figs. 3 & 4).

Considered a wonder of the medieval world by both
Muslims and Christians, the Great Mosque was the center-
piece of Cordoba, one of the most important urban centers
of the medieval Mediterranean.

The Castilian forces of the reconquista conquered Cordoba
in 1236, although the city was already greatly diminished
by the political turmoil that followed the disintegration of
the central Umayyad government in the eleventh century.
Despite Cordoba's impoverished state, its status as the for-
mer capital of al-Andalus lent the city's conquest by the
Castllians great symbolic significance. The Importance of
this victory is demonstrated by Ferdinand III of Castile's
consecration of the entire structure of the Great Mosque as
the cathedral of Santa Maria Mayor immediately after tak-
ing the city. As the repository of an important Muslim relic,
the Great Mosque of Cordoba was one of the holiest and
most venerable of Muslim sites, and its importance tran-
scended the boundaries of al-Andalus. ^

The Castllians who settled in Cordoba following the recon-
quista apparently had no qualms about worshipping in the
mosque. During the three hundred years in which Christians
worshipped there, an agglomeration of small chapels and
altars erected around the perimeter of the former prayer hall
constituted the main additions to the building. The additions
were even articulated using the same basic architectural
and decorative forms which had characterized the mosque
from Its inception, though with the addition of figural sculp-
ture.

ANDERSON,' 19

A turning point In the history of the building as a site of
Christian worship came In 1523 when the Bishop and
Canons of the Cordoba Cathedral proposed to construct a
new church within the former mosque. The proposal initiat-
ed a controversy that placed church officials at odds with
the Cordoban town council. Part of the impetus for the proj-
ect proposed by the Cordoban Bishop was no doubt a desire
to compete with more than a century's worth of construc-
tion at the new cathedral In nearby Seville.

The conquest of Seville by the Castilian forces in 1248,
twelve years after the conquest of Cordoba, followed the
same pattern of appropriation and adaptation as at
Cordoba. After the conquest of Seville, the city's Great
Mosque, an enormous hypostyle mosque and courtyard
constructed in the twelfth century, was consecrated as the
Cathedral of Santa Maria de la Asuncion. Like the Mosque
at Cordoba, Seville's new Christian congregation used the
former mosque with minimal alterations for many years.
Extensive earthquake damage in the fourteenth century,
however, necessitated rebuilding. Over the course of the fif-

teenth century, the remains of Seville's Great Mosque were
systematically destroyed to make way for a new Gothic
cathedral, the plan of which followed the enormous foot-
print of the former mosque's prayer hall. Seville's new
cathedral was a powerful emblem of the city's newly accu-
mulated wealth, derived from commercial ventures In the
Americas, and the cathedral's dominating presence in the
city was a reminder of the religious and political status it
enjoyed as arch-episcopate and the recipient of royal
patronage. Seville's new cathedral was virtually completed
by 1523, when the Bishop and Canons proposed their proj-
ect for the Cordoba mosque-cathedral. The work at Seville
was no doubt present in the mind of the Bishop of Cordoba
and the Canons when they proposed to construct a new
church.

The proposal was not well received in Cordoba, however,
where there were no pressing structural reasons to replace
the celebrated structure. Indeed, a Cordoban civic council
intervened in the fledgling undertaking, ordering the project
to a halt. The seriousness of the opposition to the destruc-
tion of the former Great Mosque was unequivocal; the
Council threatened capital punishment to anyone who
altered the structure of the former mosque in any way until
the matter was resolved. In an attempt to preserve the
existing structure, the Council appealed to Charles V to
ensure the survival of their "singular and most celebrated
antique building. "^ Without ever actually laying eyes on the
building, Charles V sided with the Bishop and Canons' in
favor of a new church, and a new main chapel [capitta
mayor) was constructed within the existing structure.
Unlike the additions which had characterized the previous
generations of Christian intervention, the project endorsed

50 /ANDERSON

by Charles V was dramatic in its invasiveness; to all appear-
ances an entire Gothic cathedral was inserted into the very
heart of the former prayer hall. In order to accommodate the
new capilla mayor, sections of the ninth- and tenth-century
additions to the prayer hall were demolished, and the dou-
ble arcades of the hypostyle interior were filled with panels
of relief sculpture to define the chapel walls. In plan, the
new chapel disrupts the illusion of the endless "forest of
columns" which had formerly characterized the interior
space, and the soaring elevation of the addition dramatical-
ly changed both the way the mosque was experienced as a
ritual space and the way in which the total architectural
composition was viewed from outside. When Charles V vis-
ited Cordoba in 1526 to assess the results of his support,
his reaction was famously unenthusiastic. "If I had known
your intentions," he allegedly commented, "you would not
have done this. You desired what could have been con-
structed anywhere, but here you had that which was
unique in the world."''

Project Two: The Two Palaces
Despite his denunciation of the addition to the Great
Mosque of Cordoba accomplished under his authority,
Charles almost immediately initiated another project at the
Alhambra. Founded in the thirteenth century by the Nasrid
dynasty, the last of the Islamic rulers on the Iberian

Peninsula, the Alhambra was a complete palatine city com-
posed of a fortress, baths, mosques, industrial areas, and a
number of gardens and palaces (Fig. 5). Whereas the Great
Mosque of Cordoba ushered in the Peninsula's Islamic era,
the Alhambra witnessed its end. As the site from which the
last Nasrid Sultan was exiled from the Iberian Peninsula by
the Castilian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, the
Alhambra became the focus of great nostalgia for what was
perceived as the vanished glory of the Peninsula's Islamic
past. The Alhambra has acquired layered meanings for
those who appropriated it and those who visited it which
are usually associated with the perceived glory of the
Islamic past, or the significance of the Christian conquest of
the Peninsula.

Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of the newly unified
Peninsula and the grandparents of Charles V, appropriated
the Alhambra as their administrative and residential center.
They adopted Nasrid court practices and even stipulated
that the Alhambra be preserved as a national monument. 5
Charles was also struck by the Alhambra, since he purport-
edly exclaimed upon seeing it, "Unhappy is he who lost all
this!"^ Charles visited Granada in 1526, the same year in
which he viewed the new chapel in Cordoba and initiated a
project to construct a new palace within the Nasrid citadel.
However, escalating tensions with the Ottoman Empire,

ANDERSON/ 51

France, and the papacy forced him to plan the new project
through correspondence with Spanish collaborators familiar
with the Alhambra site7

In 1527, while on the military campaign which ended in the
disastrous Sack of Rome, Charles V received a preliminary
proposal for the new palace — a freestanding, square, sym-
metrical structure with a round interior courtyard, first con-
ceived as a small residential villa. Though this basic formu-
la was maintained in the imposing structure eventually con-
structed, Charles insisted on the accommodation of admin-
istrative functions within the new building, thus changing
its character from private royal residence to bureaucratic
center and necessitating the destruction of parts of the
Islamic complex. 8 The massive scale of Charles' new
palace, the severe geometry of the circle-within-a square
plan, and the almost unadorned forms are rendered all the
more vivid when juxtaposed with the intimate scale and
ornamental richness of the Nasrid palaces located just steps
away.

Interpreting the Projects

Charles V's involvement with the new chapel at the Great
Mosque of Cordoba and the new palace at the Alhambra
signals a departure from previous Christian patronage at the
two Islamic monuments. How are we to interpret this shift?
The answer hinges on the relationship between Charles V
and Spain, and the political tensions between Western
Europe and the Ottoman Empire which characterized his
reign. Part of what distinguished Charles' reign as Holy
Roman Emperor from those of his predecessors was the
tangible wealth that he derived from his power base in
Spain, the most powerful of the Western European coun-
tries at the time. Charles V dominates much of the history
of sixteenth-century Western Europe. The material and mil-
itary benefits derived from his Spanish crown and the polit-
ical power he wielded as Archduke of Germany and Holy
Roman Emperor place him as the key player of events asso-
ciated with the increasingly powerful Ottoman Empire, the
rise of Protestantism, the Sack of Rome, and the revolt
within his Spanish kingdom. As Holy Roman Emperor,
Charles was at the forefront of European attempts to stave

52 /ANDERSON

off the Ottoman Empire. The increasing power of the
Ottomans was accompanied by a new tide of European hos-
tility toward Islam, as the advance of Ottoman troops into
Europe seemed to signal the impending conquest of west-
ern Christendom. The 1520s, when the projects at the
Great Mosque of Cordoba and the Alhambra were initiated,
were the most turbulent years of the sixteenth century; the
additions to the two venerable Islamic monuments convey
much of the tension Europeans felt about Islam, as well as
the European ambivalence about the material remains of the
Islamic past with which they were confronted on the Iberian
Peninsula.

In 1 527, the same year in which he began corresponding on
the specifics of his new palace at the Alhambra, Charles'
imperial troops sacked Rome. This event was stimulated in
part by the complex political maneuverings of Charles him-
self, the Pope, and the kings of France and England. ^
Charles' army spared Florence from the looting which was
considered a victorious army's due, but could not be
stopped from pillaging the papal city. As Holy Roman
Emperor, Charles' first duty was to defend Christianity. The
attack on Rome by a Christian army, in light of the Ottoman
threat, is indicative of the troubles that plagued Western
Europe and its Church. The rise of Martin Luther also
seemed to signal a crumbling from within at a time when
Christian Europe needed a unified front to withstand the
Ottoman forces. Accompanying the rising political tension,
malicious stereotypes about Muslims that had originated in
the Middle Ages proved astoundingly tenacious and were
repeated in sixteenth-century literature. One such work,
composed under the patronage of Charles V himself, used
established stereotypes in descriptions of the Ottoman
Turks as vicious rapists who preyed on innocents, virgins,
married women, widows, and orphans, and who desecrat-
ed religious images. '° Europeans worried that the Spanish
Muslims might join the Turks or the Syrians in an attempt
to overthrow Christian rule, creating a strained religious and
cultural atmosphere in sixteenth-century Spain.

However, anti-Muslim sentiment constituted only one part
of the socio-cultural context that underlies the changes
made to the former Islamic sites in the sixteenth-century.
Local competition also informed the creation of the addi-
tions: in the case of the Great Mosque, the desire of the
local Bishop and Canons to vie with nearby wealthy Seville
must have been a factor in the campaign for an updated
church. Similarly, the architectural style embodied by the
High Renaissance buildings — such as Donate Bramante's

centrally-planned Tempietto — associated with the papal
court, must have provided strong motivations in the con-
ception of the new palace at the Alhambra (Fig. 6). In addi-
tion, the palace needed to accommodate the extensive
court associated with the office of Holy Roman Emperor.

Considering the religious and political context in which
Charles V was embroiled, the dramatic additions to the
Great Mosque of Cordoba and the Alhambra, with their
insistence upon Gothic and Renaissance forms, are emphat-
ic architectural statements about the desire of sixteenth-
century Christian Europe to control the past and, by exten-
sion their stand against the rise of the Ottoman Empire. Yet,
the sixteenth-century additions, when viewed in tandem
with their Islamic contexts, also convey a deep ambivalence
about the Islamic monuments on the part of the projects'
patrons and the local communities who identified deeply
with the monuments despite their Islamic history. In fact,
the extent to which the Islamic origins of the monuments
were present in the minds of the communities who used
them IS not clear. Surely, the importance of the monuments
stemmed from the layers of meaning and memory acquired
during their posx-reconquista appropriation by new commu-
nities of users and patrons, more than any conception of
the monuments' Islamic history.

I have already noted Charles V's celebrated preference for
the Great Mosque of Cordoba before the insertion of the
new capilla mayor. And, like many other Europeans who
visited the Alhambra in the sixteenth century, Charles also
clearly admired the Nasrid palaces. He was particularly
attracted to the Court of the Lions and insisted that the new
palace be sited in a way that would allow him immediate
access to it from his private apartments, although the con-
figuration he desired would have necessitated the destruc-
tion of the Alhambra Church (again, a former mosque) of
Santa Maria del Alhambra. '^ The local Christian population
strongly opposed the destruction of the mosque-turned-
church: when Charles requested that the archbishop of
Granada deconsecrate the site to allow for construction, the
archbishop responded that such authority rested with the
Pope alone, and further admonished Charles V with the
examples of Constantine and Theodosius, Roman emperors
who had given their palaces to the Church. Considering the
recent Sack of Rome by Charles' army, the Pope was
unwilling to deconsecrate the site. Charles finally accepted
the impossibility of building the new palace immediately
adjacent to the Court of the Lions and the project was able
to proceed. Remarkably, Charles' willingness to destroy a

ANDERSON/ 53

church and to suffer the disapproval of the Christian com-
munity merely to gain greater proximity to the Court of the
Lions resulted in a four-year delay in construction of his new
palace.

The European valorization of Islamic material culture, includ-
ing architecture, in the sixteenth century was of course not
a new phenomenon, but the continuation of a long-estab-
lished pattern. Beginning in the Middle Ages the Church put
Islamic luxury goods, especially textiles and objects of rock
crystal and precious metal to liturgical use. Saints' relics
were often wrapped in Islamic textiles, even in fragments
woven with passages from the Koran, and the use of psue-
do-Kufic calligraphy in paintings of the Madonna and Child
became common. i3 Such instances of Christian adaptation
of Islamic material culture are sometimes simply dismissed
as polemical statements of Christian conquest of Islam, but
clearly such appropriations demonstrate, as the sixteenth-
century additions to the Great Mosque of Cordoba and the
Alhambra do, the ambivalence surrounding architecture,
religion, politics, and identity that underlay the appropriation

of Islamic objects by sixteenth-century Christian Europeans.
Despite the political tension between Western Europe and
the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, the reactions
of Charles V and those who lived with and used the monu-
ments indicate that to summarize the additions to the reli-
gious structures as the architectural embodiments of anti-
Muslim polemic, as we might instinctively do, is too sim-
plistic. At the very least, such an interpretation is but one
part of a larger and more complex array of meanings which
can be attached to the monuments following the later addi-
tions. The sixteenth-century changes may be best under-
stood as a way in which Charles V and the Bishop and
Canons of Cordoba preserved monuments which they val-
ued despite any evocation of the Islamic past or Muslim cul-
ture which the buildings might have conveyed. The addi-
tions at the Great Mosque of Cordoba and the Alhambra
also provided a way for the Christian rulers to distance
themselves from and to disrupt the cultural continuity
which these two most celebrated Islamic monuments of the
Iberian Peninsula represented in the sixteenth century.

51 /ANDERSON

Notes

1 In rethinking the assumptions I made about this topic in my M.A thesis, from
which this article is drawn, I benefited from many conversations with several
members of HTC at MIT. I would especially like to thank Howayda al-Harithy,
David Friedman, Michele Lamprakos, and Kathy Wheeler-Borum for generously
sharing their thoughts and advice.

2 Jerrilynn D, Dodds, "The Great Mosque of Cordoba," in al-Andalus: The Art
of Islamic Spain (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Patronato de la
Alhambra, 1992), 1 1-26; Nuha Khoury, "The meaning of the Great Mosque of
Cordoba in the tenth century," Muqarnas 13 (19961: 80-98.

3 Luis Marfa Ramirez y las Casas-Deza, Corografia Historico-Estadistica de la
Pfovincia y Obispado de Cordoba, Vol, 2, edited by Antonio Lopez Ontiveros
(Cordoba: Publicaciones del Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Cordoba.
19861. 458. Dodds, "Great Mosque," 24-25.

4 Casas-Deza. 459-

5 Ibid., 458-59.

6 Jonathan Brown. "Spain in the Age of Exploration: Crossroads of Artistic
Cultures," Circa 1492. edited by Jay A Levenson (New Haven; Yale University
Press. 1991), 41-49.

7 Karl Baedeker, Spain and Portugal, Handbook for Travelers, fourth edition
(Leipsic: Karl Baedeker. 1913), 349.

8 For a discussion of the figures involved in the complex building history of the
palace, see Earl Rosenthal, The Palace of Charles V in Granada (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), 3-21 . For an analysis of Machuca's paintings
see Rosenthal, 223-235; for Luis Hurtado Mendoza's background and classical
interests see Rosenthal, 7-10.

9 Ibid., 23-27.

10 Andre Chastel, The Sack of Rome. 1527, translated by Beth Archer
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977},

1 1 John S. Geary, "Arredondo's Castillo inexpugnable de la fee: Anti-Islamic
Propaganda in the Age of Charles V," Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam.
edited by John V. Tolan (NY: Garland Publishing. Inc., 19961, 291-312.

12 Ibid., 35-42.

13 Oleg Grabar, "Islamic Architecture and the West — Influences and Parallels,"
Islam and the Medieval West, edited by Stanley Ferber (New York; University
Art Galleries, 1975). Also see Vladimir P. Goss, "Western Architecture and the
World of Islam," The Meeting of Two Worlds: Cultural Exchange betv\/een East
and West during the Period of the Crusades, edited by Vladimir P. Goss
(Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University,
1986), 361-376.

Illustrations

Fig. 1: Court of the Lions, Alhambra.

Fig. 2: Great Mosque of Cordoba, plan showing the vaulting and tracery with

the sixteenth-century addition at the center.

Fig, 3: CapHla Mayor in the Great Mosque, dome.

Fig. 4: Great Mosque Prayer Hall, Cordoba.

Fig, 5: Alhambra complex. Palace of Charles V (circle-within-square plan) in the

center with the Court of the Myrtles and the Court of the Lions in the north and

northeast corner.

Fig. 6: Palace of Charles V, Granada,

ANDERSON/ 55

NASSER RABBAT

IN THE BEGINNING WAS
ON THE IMAGE OF THE TWO
SANCTUARIES OF ISLAM

THE HOUSE:
NOBLE

Architecture is an expansive concept with multifarious def-
initions. It Is primarily the envelope of human activities and
beliefs expressed diversely depending on time, culture, envi-
ronment, setting, and technical capability. But It Is also that
branch of human creativity that is relied upon to frame,
embody, and preserve memories. Despite Victor Hugo's
melancholy proclamation, ceci tuera cela, suggesting that
printing will eliminate architecture as the carrier of memory,
the Interdependence between architecture and memory has
never waned. Nor does it show any sign of weakening in
the more than a quarter century since the Introduction of
computers, followed by telecommunication, digitization,
and the web. In fact, recent developments in the study of
memory have focused on architecture as a fertile field of
investigation Into the mechanisms by which Individuals as
well as groups create, store, retrieve, and manipulate their
memories. Not surprisingly, the connection between archi-
tecture and memory has not been more effective than in
two of the most primordial and intimate of architectural
spaces: the house and the temple. And, nowhere has the
memorial reciprocity between house and temple been more
pronounced than In the two foundational Islamic religious
centers, the Ka'ba in Mecca and the Mosque of the Prophet
in Medina.

Most of us recognize the house as our first encounter with
architecture. We experience It with our senses and our feel-
ings: spatially, visually, viscerally, verbally, emotionally, and
Imaginatively. It Is our abode, shelter, place of residence,
and often our place of birth or death. It Is the center of our
personal and familial activities and the shield of our privacy
and intimacy. We live within its walls, under its roof, pro-
tected from inclement weather, harsh sunlight, intrusive
gaze, and unwelcome transgressions from the outside.

Most societies have developed a mental image of the house
that epitomizes Its essential qualities and is passed on to all
their members. We all have seen how children of a certain
culture, particular climate, or social milieu tend to draw the
house in a similar fashion, often as a cube or a rectangle —
the perfect shape of shelter — pierced by windows and
doors, and sometimes topped with some l<ind of roof (usu-
ally a gabled roof in the northern climes). But this is a gen-
eral representation of the house, any house, as the collec-
tive memory of society has imagined It. It Is not yet "my
house." For a house to be my house, it has to be architec-
turally and perceptually personalized. It has to encompass
the realm of my private and intimate life. It has to be the
repository of my memories and those that I share with my
family, friends, and relatives. It also has to be the reminder
of my most significant moments, my successes and fail-
ures, my bygone years, and my departed loved ones. All of
these feelings have to be inscribed in my house's forms and
spaces, its nooks and crannies, its details and furniture, and
have to remain there decipherable only to me and to those
close to me. My house also has to evoke the same sensa-
tions that I once experienced while inhabiting it, even
though the events and environments in which I first encoun-
tered these sensations may have disappeared. Furthermore,
I should be able to recall these memories even when I see
my house In my mind's eye, speak about it to others who
do not know it, or come back to It after many years of
absence. This is precisely the unfettered abundance of
meaning that architecture possesses and manipulates. In
addition to the collective memory that begets and defines it,
architecture has the capacity to absorb and convey private
meanings, meanings that reflect and identify Its designers,
owners, viewers, or users.

56 /RABBAT

on Earth. According to different legends, it was based on a
heavenly model and created prior to the Earth itself, the
angels built it on divine order, or Adam, the first man, built
it. After the Deluge, it was rebuilt by Abraham and his son,
Ishmael, as a house of worship for the one God but was
later contaminated by polytheistic practices. The Ka'ba thus
carried primal mystical significance and primeval memories
that were reclaimed by Muhammad during his prophetic
mission, and which culminated in his triumphant re-entry
into Mecca, cleansing the Ka'ba of all signs of polytheism.
The centrality of the Ka'ba was ensconced in the nascent
Islamic faith through its declaration as the qibia (liturgical
orientation) towards which all Muslims should pray and the
institution of the hajj to Mecca — the ritual circumambulation
of the Ka'ba seven times — as one of the five fundamental
Pillars of Islam. Scholarly treatises and folkloric narratives
later elaborated on these initial functions which endowed
every detail of the Ka'ba and its surroundings with a host
of cultic meanings and religio-historic importance.

Architectural types vary in their ability to accommodate
memories. Some are believed to be more capacious than
others, but there is a commonly accepted correlation
between the monumental and the memorial. Large, lofty,
and complex buildings tend to command an excess of
meaning that cannot be filled with their direct and inten-
tional functions and intents. The memorial surplus is usual-
ly consumed by symbolic, ideological, emotional, intellectu-
al, or private references. Most celebrated national and reli-
gious monuments take advantage of this established corre-
spondence between grandeur and remembrance to con-
struct their messages. But this is only one type of significa-
tion in memorial architecture — and the most obvious and
direct one at that. A more mature architecture does not
depend for its meanings on elaborate designs, large spaces,
precious materials, or extensively circumscribed signs and
relics. This artful architecture evokes the memories
attached to it but does not fix them. It consciously mani-
fests ample possibilities of nonspecific functions and mean-
ings in its forms and spaces so that the individual can make
it his or her own architecture, the milieu of his or her own
memories, while it retains its initial role as the repository of
collective meanings and memories.

The Ka'ba in Mecca displays these attributes as well as
some more potent ones for it serves as the Omphalos of the
Earth according to Islamic cosmology (Fig. 1|. It is an
ancient cubical stone building with no definitive origin. The
Koran (3:961 calls it the first "House of God" IBayt Allah)

But the Ka'ba, by virtue of its simple, hollow, and
unadorned form — which seems to have changed little
despite its having been built five times in the first Islamic
century — is also at once the most ideal space for the
embodiment of abstract concepts and the best receptacle of
individual memories. Despite its immutability as the
axiomatic symbol of Islamic cosmogony, the Ka'ba is the
perfect crystallization of the most elementary notion of the
house Ibayt) as imagined by most people: the cube, the
most earthly of the basic geometric forms as opposed to the
sphere, the most celestial of them. The Ka'ba (which is pho-
netically suggestive of the English word "cube" although
they belong to different families of languages) is thus akin
to the original house. It carries in its cubicalness the most
fundamental recollections of home as they have been
imbedded in the depth of human collective memory since
people began to settle down, build houses, and live togeth-
er in kinship-based communities.

Whence comes the symbolic, supra-religious omnipotence
of the Ka'ba. With its familiar and supremely memorial
form, containing within its neat contour universal signs
related to the upbringing of the individual in a protective
shelter with a loving family, the Ka'ba invites its visitor to
indulge memories of his/her own house. It ingratiates itself
to the visitor as a private, warm, and familiar space
although it never loses either its essential significance as
the congregational center of the Islamic nation or the focus
of Its transcendental connection with heaven. This Is the

RABBAT/ 57

reason for the Ka'ba's success as a memorial structure. It
Is both the original House of God, which is the locus of
human veneration as postulated by Islamic theology, and
the ultimate reminder of both the ubiquitous and particular
house imagined by most people. It is the unique proof of a
link to the heavenly realm and an intimate human meta-
form. It represents Islamic collective memory in its most
inclusive and universal form, and it serves as the referent to
the private, individualized, and fuzzy memory of one's own
home. Perhaps this is why the Ka'ba has rarely been copied
in Islamic architectural history; its recent imitators — notably
in Dacca, Bangladesh — have failed to endow their model
with the same kind of significance which the original so
effortlessly imparts to its visitors. Its inimitability lies in the
unique memory it embodies.

The Mosque of the Prophet in Medina is diametrically
opposed in conception to the Ka'ba. The Mosque of the
Prophet is physically and liturgically attached to his house
and was similarly venerated by Muslims since the beginning
of Islam (Fig. 2). However, it was meant to be mundane,
social, and public and to mark the establishment of the
Islamic polity under the authority of its leader Muhammad

and its constitution, the Koran. A simple open and rectan-
gular court bordered on the north and south by rudimenta-
ry hypostyle halls, the Mosque accommodated several func-
tions. It was the House of the Nation (Bayt al-Umma), a site
of worship, an agora, a courthouse, a learning center, and
a refuge for the poor, homeless, and destitute. But what
lent the Mosque its fundamental and unique significance
and ensured its lasting remembrance was first and foremost
its contiguity to the House of the Prophet iBayt al-RasuD —
a measly row of shacks on one side of the Mosque, each
housing one wife. The adjacency of the house imbued the
Mosque with the personal and intimate aspects of the
Prophet's life, constituting the ideal life depicted in sunna
(traditions of the Prophet) compilations and considered by
every pious Muslim as the moral and behavioral example to
follow.

The Mosque of the Prophet was fast duplicated and repro-
duced during the first Islamic century in numerous congre-
gational mosques in Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Iraq,
Yemen, North Africa, Spain, and Iran. Copies of the
prophetic archetype, however, were not based solely on
ideal and memorial values: they were also consequences of

58 ,'RABBAT

the Mosque of the Prophet's near-perfect assimilation of the
religious, political, and social needs of the first Islamic com-
munities. The early mosques were all effectively used as the
centers of Islamic life in both newly founded and conquered
cities.

In time, the House of the Prophet was absorbed into the
continuously expanding mosque to accommodate the
increasing flow of visitors. In one of the rooms of the House
of the Prophet, Muhammad and his close companions and
immediate successors Abu Bakr and Omar were entombed.
The entire complex became secondary only to the Ka'ba as
a site of visitation during the hajj. Subsequently, the memo-
rial, symbolic, and functional properties of the original struc-
ture became assimilated with the collective consciousness
of the growing Islamic nation, pointing to the memory of the
founder of Islam and the organization of his divinely inspired
and well-guided community. The copies of the Mosque of
the Prophet had to subsume these transformations
although, unlike their archetype, they contained no prophet-
ic relics or spatial memories of the Prophet. Instead, they
became the architectural signs of the nation's yearning to
recapture the Golden Age of the Prophet and to reenact his
communal model. Even the liturgical elements that became
essential features of every mosque by the end of the first
Islamic century — the minaret, mihrab, and minbar— had
their origins in some initial prototype from the Prophet's
Mosque. The institutionalization of the elements reinforced
the dual functions of all mosques, regardless of exact archi-
tectural form: to remember so as to emulate the prophetic
exemplar. They further articulated the memorial function
through the specific meanings that they came to carry as
landmarks, as sites of ritual services, and as reminders of
the first instances of their use during the lifetime of the
departed and beloved founder, the Prophet Muhammad.

what became integral to Islam and Islamic world views had
its first test run before being incorporated either in the com-
memorative rituals of the ha/J or the day-to-day practices of
Muslims. The two structures struck a delicate balance
between the monumental environments of collective mem-
ories and the warm, intimate spaces of personal associa-
tions and remembrance. What is more, they accomplished
this task primarily through their intelligently referenced
architecture. By formally and symbolically alluding to proto-
typical houses, the two structures enabled the individual to
form personal connections to them (complete with private
images and fantasies) without losing an iota of their reli-
gious and cosmological hold on the Islamic collective con-
sciousness. The Ka'ba and the Mosque of the Prophet
enriched their attendant abstract and enigmatic meanings
by imbuing them with the universal and serene connota-
tions of the house; as a result, they succeeded in bringing
hallowed concepts down to the level of the lived and the
tangibility of everyday life.

No doubt, this is why these two primordial houses have
become the subjects of intense acts of private devotion and
commemoration. Countless Muslims communicate with the
buildings in highly personal ways. They imagine them as
familiar forms, dream about visiting them, experience a cer-
tain pious rapture when they see them, remember them
passionately after their visit, and try to recapture their
impressions of them lyrically and pictorially. By means of
these sensory or pictorial experiences, the Ka'ba and the
Mosque of the Prophet have transcended their communal
and cosmological meanings to penetrate the inner circles of
the individual's mental space, lodged there as private and
privately cherished memories. This, in my opinion, is the
noblest achievement to which architecture can aspire.

The Ka'ba and the Mosque of the Prophet were the sites of
epochal events in early Islamic history, thus endowing the
buildings with powerful meanings which became deeply
rooted in Islamic collective memory. In addition, the two
houses were the foundational loci upon which much of

Illustrations

Ftg, 1: The Ka'ba, Mecca.

Fig, 2: The Mosque of the Prophet, Medina.

RABBAT/ 59

CAGLA HADIMIOGLU

BETWEEN PRAYERS:

PROSCRIBED SCENES FROM A HISTORIC MONUMENT

11

The twenty minutes of edited video footage from the fourteenth-century congregational Mosque of Yazd in Iran engages Henri
Lefebvre's definition of a monument as:

determined by what may take place there and consequently by what may not take place there, (prescribed/ pro-
scribed, scene/obscene) J

Proscribed activities do take place at the Mosque, but they are transgressive. I chose to shoot and edit the communal, non-
ritual activities of the Mosque — the activities which occur "between prayers" — and I privileged moments of authority and
transgression, work and play. The caretakers, the regulators of the space, constitute almost archetypal figures of authority
controlling what is allowed, and what is not, while children and young men are figures of transgression, animating the Mosque
with proscribed activities.

60 /HADIHIOGLU

Neither the figures of authority within the Mosque nor those of transgression are stable. The camera participates in shifting
the activities of the individual from prescribed to proscribed or vice versa. For example, I had requested that the caretaker,
All Yarmir, use the camera to record his favorite places in the Mosque; he unexpectedly turned the lens on his friend in imi-
tation of my own interviews. AN, operating a small Hi-8 video camera, is ridiculed for his "play:" "You're very busy?" taunts
his friend, "You're shooting film!"

HADIHIOGLU/ 61

The children, although proscribed from playing in the Mosque — "they have to play in the lane" — play carefree in several spaces
of the Mosque including the mihrab (two girls run between their praying mothers). "Capturing" such behavior prescribes it —
the children are validated by the camera; the camera also discourages the caretakers from admonishment. Focusing study on
the "obscene," by definition, renders it a "scene."

62 /HADIMIOGLU

In recording the prescribed and proscribed functions of the monument, the edited video also highlights what is generally pro-
scribed from our archival practices. Instead of constructing a "scene" that focuses on the monument as a built artifact, the
video presents the lived occupation of the Mosque — what would conventionally be relegated to outside the camera's frame
or edited out of the final product. As such, the figures of authority, the caretakers, and the figures of transgression, the chil-
dren, stand in for the unstable identity of the scholar herself.

HADIMIOGLU/ 63

Although I ostensibly present the edited footage in an academic context, as a "document" of study, the highlighted instabil-
ity of authority and transgression implies the instability of the status of my own work. The incorporation into the video of
footage shot by the Mosque's regular inhabitants problematizes my "play" as an outsider. Yet, the disparate quality of our
images and the respective size of our cameras provide evidence of my own apparent "authority" in relation to these local
"authorities" and to the work. Within the video, my work is explicitly thrown into the discourse of the prescribed and pro-
scribed activities of the Mosque. This is apparent in an overheard discussion between a few local young men and the head
caretaker, Haji Abbas:

et /HADIHIOGLU

Mohammad Reza: She's here to take pictures for her study, is there anything wrong with that?"
Haji Abbas: "Yes there's something wrong with that!"

Ali Reza: "What? What's wrong?"

Haji Abbas: "Don't you care about the sanctity of the mosque? Is it a mosque or is it a cinema?"

Is it a mosque or is it an exhibition hall? Is it a mosque. ..or is it a school?"

The moving image as a form of knowledge production is typically marginalized within the "discourses of sobriety" which they
serve; this experiment, situated within the domain of architectural history and theory, constitutes a similarly transgressive
"play. "2 The "sanctity of the mosque" to which Haji Abbas refers might stand in for the "sanctity" of scholarship that dic-
tates propriety in representational practice, admitting certain mediums and excluding others.

HADIMIOGLU/ 65

Another passage from Lefebvre structures the edited footage as well:

Architecture produces living bodies, each with its own distinctive traits. The animating principle of such a body, its
presence, is neither visible nor legible as such, nor is it the object of any discourse, for it reproduces itself within
those who use the space in question, within their lived experience. Of that experience, the tourist, the passive spec-
tator, can grasp but a pale shadow.

The final sentence, "Of that experience the tourist, the passive spectator, can grasp but a pale shadow," concludes the work.
Although the scholar, clearly an outsider, is conflated with the tourist, she is incorporated within the video and actively par-
ticipates in grasping shadows (digital encodings). The edited video offers both a critique of how we conventionally think about
architecture and represent it, effacing the practices of the occupants, and offers an alternative, albeit imperfect, and one of
many possibilities.

56 /HADIMIOGLU

Caretakers
Also Featuring
Camera

Editing

All Yarmjr and Haji Abbas

The congregation at the Mosque of Yazd

Mohammad Reza Alvansaz

C. Hadimioglu

All Yarmir

Hassan YazdJ

C. Hadimioglu

Translations and Interviews in Yazd

Mehdi Saeed Shirazi
Mozaffer Davudi

Translation in Boston Mehdi Yahyanejad

Notes

1 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-
Smith (Oxford. UK: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1991), 224.

2 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
1991), 23, Nichols coins the phrase "discourse of sobriety."

HADIMIOGLU/ 67

68 /AKKACH

SAMER AKKACH

RELIGIOUS MAPPING

AND THE SPATIALITY OF DIFFERENCE

It is no longer a question of either maps or terri-
tory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign
difference between them that was the abstrac-
tion's charm. For it is the difference which forms
the poetry of the map and the charm of the terri-
tory, the magic of the concept and the charm of
the real.
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, 1983, 3.

Driving from Boston to Montreal and Ottawa for the first
time, I was taken by the "charm of the territory." Yet, I was
also agitated by the tension between the map and the terri-
tory. The map helped me make sense of the new territory,
and ultimately find my way, whereas the territory kept
resisting the mapping conventions and challenging my read-
ings, constantly revealing itself in surprisingly different
ways. Losing the way became part of the experience that
was taxing in as much as it was charming. On the stretch-
es of highway, I wondered what it would have been like to
travel without a map. Or with a map of inverted orientation,
as the medieval Islamic maps (Fig. 1), or with one of
Heinrich Bunting's sixteenth-century maps depicting the ter-
ritory in the form of a winged stallion or a crowned woman
(Figs. 2 & 3).

Through the mediation of sophisticated satellite and com-
puter technologies, we now assume a certain real and
objective relationship between the map and the territory
and we see the stable geography of the earth as preceding
the map. The map has simply become an abstraction of this
non-negotiable reality, a mere tool with which to compre-
hend the land and find the way. In order to ensure univer-
sal comprehension of the map, the conventions of mapping
are made consistent and transparent. Thus, a uniform sense
of spatiality anchored in the Cartesian conception of reality

has been engendered by modern cartography. This sense of
spatiality — an integral part of modernity — was alien to many
pre-modern societies wherein geography was subordinated
to theology, and wherein the map preceded the territory
(Fig. 4). Access to God's all-encompassing vision of the ter-
ritory, attained today through aerial surveys and satellite-
projected images, was achieved primarily through religious
texts. Visions, depictions, and spatial experiences of the
territory were, therefore, conditioned by religious concep-
tions, which enabled multiple forms of imaginative mapping
of the world. Today, we are compelled to define such map-
ping as "imaginative" because we have another form of
mapping which we consider to be "real." Yet, these imagi-
native projections were just as real for pre-modern commu-
nities as the more technically sophisticated projections
today.

The travelogues of the Damascene scholar 'Abd al-Ghani al-
Nabulusi, (d. 1741 AD) for example, show how imaginative
mapping operates. In the travelogue of his journey to
Jerusalem, al-Nabulusi frames the recording of his memoirs
with an imaginative mapping of the geography of Jerusalem
and the surrounding landscapes, referencing the geography
of Mecca and other towns in the Hijaz region. ^ Al-Nabulusi
had not been to the Hijaz when he projected this geograph-
ic correspondence; he had neither seen nor experienced the
places and the landscapes to which he referred. His major
journey to Syria, Egypt, and the Hijaz took place four years
after the journey to Palestine. Religious narratives enabled
al-Nabulusi to conceptualize and visualize continuities and
parallels between these two sacred geographies, and to
make a unique sense of both the geography of Jerusalem he
was experiencing and that of Hijaz, which was not immedi-
ately available to him.

AKKACH/ 69

EVROPA PRIMA PARS TEILR^ IN FORMA VIRGINIS

15

MEKIDIES.

Al-Nabulusi reports a story, related by one of the Jerusalem
locals, of a Christian master builder who converted to Islam
after a Muslim saint appeared to him in a dream. To vener-
ate the saint, the master builder decided to construct a
domed tomb on his grave. At the very moment of comple-
tion, when the master builder climbed up the dome to install
the crescent, the surrounding geography suddenly trans-
formed. From the top of the dome in the neighborhood of
Ginin in Palestine, Mecca and Medina suddenly became vis-
ible; the master builder could decipher the vision only with
the help of the son of the saint himself. 2

Our modern sense of spatiality makes it difficult for us to
comprehend such projections. How is it possible for the
thousands of miles that distance Ginin from Mecca and
Medina to collapse? The answer lies in both the different
notion of mapping and the different sense of spatiality the

pre-modern Muslim had, which derives from subordinating
geography to theology and from regarding the map as pre-
ceding the territory. Mapping was not just a representation-
al act but a creative one.

By "mapping," I do not mean the scientific enterprise of
geographers and cartographers — although this is included —
but making sense of geography through various conceptual
or graphical means. 3 To map is to take the measure of the
world, and taking measure involves, on the one hand, selec-
tion, translation, and differentiation, and on the other, visu-
alizing, conceptualizing, recording, and representing.
Whether conceptually or graphically projected, mapping
configures space, translating it into a familiar and recogniz-
able place wherein geographic locations are meaningfully
related. Thus, mapping is not confined to the archived and
the drawn; it can be spiritual, political, cultural, or moral,

70 /AKKACH

I<f.

ASIA SECVNDA PARS TEUR^ INFORM A PEG ASI-

SEPTErSTRIu.

17.

and it can include, as many examples show, the remem-
bered, the imagined, the anticipated, and the desired.
Accordingly, mapping plays a central role in configuring our
sense of spatiality, that is, our ways of understanding and
making sense of the landscape, both in its natural and con-
structed form. Today, "cultural mappings play a central role
in establishing the territories we inhabit and experience as
real," as religious mappings in pre-modern societies." Each
religion constructed its own spatiality of difference which
unfolded a range of creative and interpretive possibilities.^

To understand what the spatiality of difference entails in
different religious contexts, one needs to examine the
notions that are associated with the creative, rather than
the imitative, projection of geography. In other words, it is
not the working of cartographic production that is most
revealing here, but rather the mode of thinking. To under-

stand al-Nabulusi's narrative, for instance, we need to turn
our attention to the religious concepts that are associated
with the significance of, and relationship between, places
and landscapes. The Arab-Islamic concept of fada' if is per-
haps the most pertinent. ^ Fada'il literally means "virtues"
and "merits;" it is a plural form of fadila, meaning "moral
excellence," and it derives from the trilateral f.d.l., meaning
"to be in excess," "to excel," and "to be superior." It is
used mainly as an adjective in panegyric literature to denote
the virtues and merits of certain texts, individuals, cities,
monuments, or times. The concept of fada'il pre-dates
Islam, but, in the early stages of the religion, the fada'il
texts compiled sayings attributed to the Prophet and his
immediate companions. Later, they developed into a recog-
nizable style of historiography infused with Islamic mythol-
ogy and popular legends. The fada'il discourse derives pri-
marily from being, as it were, a by-product of, and a direct

AKKACH/ 71

1

72 /AKKACH

extension of, the science of prophetic traditions {'ilm al-
hadith).

The religious concept of fada'il might seem remote to map-
ping, however, it is pertinent to both the constructed and
the natural environment. Fada'il texts mark certain sites and
cities, conferring religious significance upon them and
establishing hierarchical relationships between them. The
instrumentality of mapping is inscribed in the concept of
fada'il through its tactics of delineating virtuous places, of
structuring them hierarchically, and of imbuing them with
spiritual, cosmological, and eschatological significance.
Through the textual delineation, a conceptual map is drawn.
However, to see the agency of the fada'il at work as a form
of religious mapping, one need not look in the fada'il texts
themselves, for they only act, so to speak, as a "structur-
ing grid." Rather, other chronicles, literature, and particular-
ly, travelogues, and accounts of visitation (ziyarat) demon-
strate the fada'il as a mapping guide. Occasionally, these
texts present narratives which reveal the conceptual grid
and the mapping agency of the fada'il through the "con-
tours" of peculiar spatial practices and experiences. Both
the correspondence al-Nabulusi visualizes between the Hijaz
region and Jerusalem and the extraordinary visual experi-
ence of the master builder derive from the sacred virtues
the two regions mark on the map of holiness. What lies in
between is less significant and can be removed by religious
desires.

The concept of fada'il is predicated on divine authority and
mediated through literature. In this way, the concept of
fada'il bears some similarity to the concept of "geopiety"
found in other traditions. However, its modes of realizing
and mapping a spatiality of difference are uniquely Islamic.^
Despite their often-considerable length, the fada'il texts
lack the compositional coherence of a narrative and the
cogency of an argument. They are made up of fragmented,
yet authoritative statements around which are woven a
web of conceptions, mythical stories, and historical
accounts. The fada'il authors, many of whom were hadith
scholars (i.e., scholars concerned with the authentication
and accurate reporting of the prophet's sayings) construct-
ed their arguments through authentication rather than inter-
pretation or measuring them up against the reality they rep-
resent. The authors of the fada'il rarely ask: what does the
reported statement (or hadith) say? Or, is what is said valid?
They instead ask: on whose authority does the authenticity
of the statement hinge? What are the reported variations?
And where does the text fit in the overall economy of hadith

scholarship? The context of these representational tracts,
recedes behind the concern for its legitimacy and authen-
ticity. The text itself appears transparent; it does not pose
questions concerning agency, representation, and reality.
What the text says is conflated with what it represents: the
text becomes the reality. The fada'il discourse can thus be
seen as a literary creation of reality; it realizes what it rep-
resents. It realizes difference; it makes difference real geo-
graphically; it creates a spatiality of difference.

In this sense, the concept of fada'il promotes a discrimina-
tory view of geography based on God's own "preference"
{tafdil, a derivative of fada'il). Things do not just happen
serendipitously, but manifest in accordance with divine par-
tiality, the logic of which hinges on the necessity of differ-
ence. In the overall scheme of creation, according not only
to Islam but also to many other religions, different people,
texts and places are not of equal status. In the beginning
was difference. And difference was never meant to be pro-
jected democratically. Difference was predicated on a pref-
erence—an absolute, non-negotiable divine preference.
From this perspective, the /arfa '// concept can be seen as an
attempt to layout the matrix of differentiation spatially and
to reveal the pattern of divine preference. It is a literary act
to inscribe the ontological foundation of difference. Yet, dif-
ference IS a relational concept that requires a horizon of ref-
erence against which the other can be differentiated.
Naturally, the fada'il projects Islam as that horizon of refer-
ence to explain and identify divine preferences. The non-
Muslim other occupies an awkwardly marginal position that
IS never in accordance with the order of things. The other
is de-placed and de-spatialized. The fada'il texts on
Jerusalem, for example, relate an elaborate story of how
the Christians' attempts to construct a monumental building
over the sacred rock — where the Dome of Rock was later
built — long before the Islamic takeover, repeatedly failed.
Their exquisite and highly adorned structure miraculously
collapsed three times, forcing the Christians to consider a
different site. It was not their architectural or engineering
inadequacies that led to the repeated collapse, but simply
their religious otherness. According to Islamic tradition, the
site was originally designated for Muslims, and could only
tolerate an architectural possibility in concordance with, as
It were, the legitimate "cartographer," Islam. In this man-
ner, the fada'il discourse relies on a politicized difference.
Difference is politicized through religious scenarios of
encounters with the sacred, which take place in the blurred
spatiality of the real and the imaginary, the earthly and the
heavenly. It is a determinedly Islamic version of geo-politics

AKKACH/ 73

wherein God, along with the Muslims, acts as a central fig-
ure in the plotting, unfolding, and staging of events.
Through such geo-mythical conceptions, the ^ada 7/ enables,
on the one hand, a unique religious mapping of the world,
and on the other, the articulation of a spatial sensibility that
blurs the boundary between the mythical and the real. It is
through both the mapping act and the blurring of spatiality
that the fada'il confers significance on places, buildings,
and landscapes, thereby constructing its spatiality of differ-
ence (Fig. 4).

There are significant differences between conventional
mapping and that of the fada'il. As a representational act,
conventional mapping generates a duality: the real and the
image. This involves an implicit tension: which comes first
the geography or the map? When the territory is seen to
precede the map, geographic reality becomes objectively
stable, as is the case today. But when the "map" is seen to
precede the territory, then geographic reality is never objec-
tively stable, never "something external and 'given' for our
apprehension. "8 As a mode of seeing, the mapping of
fada'il precedes the territory; in fact, it creates the territo-
ry. Whereas the geograpfiy of conventional mapping is, by
definition, mimetic, with the drawn map signifying spatial
stability, the geography of the fada'il is projective and cre-
ative. It is a "tracing" of potentiality rather than fixed reali-
ty, a potentiality that unfolds in a multitude of forms with
different encounters, engagements, and participations. As
documented in numerous texts, this potentiality seems to
actively engage the imagination of pre-modern Muslims,
broadening their scope beyond the confines of the actual.
Since the text is conflated with reality, the fada'il does not
differentiate between reality and representation, but
between what is on and o^A the map; what is virtuous and,
therefore, different, and what is not.

Maps were originally conceived as a means of finding and
founding the world. ^ Until modern technologies facilitated
the projection of stable, non-negotiable images of the earth,
mapping was largely an individually creative act (Fig. D.'O
Pre-modern Muslim geographers, for instance, were able to
creatively project their own "images" of the world. In pre-
modern Islam, neither the term "map" nor the act of "map-
ping," existed in the modern sense. The terms sura, rasm,
naqsti, which are used in pre-modern Arabic literature,
denote the ideas of "form," "image," "drawing," and "paint-
ing" and are not exclusive to the field of geography and car-
tography. The modern term kharita, used both in Turkish
and in Arabic, came from Catalan carta through the Greek

kfiarti.''^ It bears no relevance to pre-modern Islamic geo-
graphic conceptions or spatial practices.

It is interesting to note that until the later Ottoman period,
Muslims do not seem to have mapped their holy places.
Medieval mapping of Jerusalem, for example, was a purely
Christian genre. ^^ Neither Jews nor Muslims were known to
have mapped the city, despite its significance in both tradi-
tions and their conspicuous preoccupation with its geogra-
phy, architecture, and the urban landscape. Until the
Crusade at the end of the eleventh century, only one map
of Jerusalem is known to have existed, the Byzantine
Madaba map of the sixth century. After the Crusaders' con-
quest, about twenty maps are known to have existed until
the end of the fifteenth century, when the new printing
technology had facilitated the production of maps. ^3 From
the sixteenth century onwards, Ottoman images of cities
and urban centers began to emerge, mostly in the form of
pictorial representations. This ambivalence towards the
graphic representation of territory tends to give primacy to
the verbal-literary depictions of the fada'il and the imagina-
tive constructions it engenders. As late as the eighteenth
century, as al-Nabulusi's texts clearly indicate, the concept
of the fada'il was widely operative. The fluidity of its ver-
bal-literary expressions had continued to activate the imag-
inative mappings and to evoke the poetic visualizations of
geographies and landscapes up to the colonial encounters.

To conclude with a poetic example of religious mapping and
the spatiality of difference in pre-modern Islam, I shall draw
again on al-Nabulusi's travel memoirs. Describing the rela-
tionship between two springs of water, Silwan in Palestine
and Zamzam in Mecca, al-Nabulusi reveals an interesting
geo-poetical concern. i'' How can the water of Zamzam be
salty when it is in the most virtuous place on earth? In tack-
ling this question, Muslim scholars played on the meanings
of the Arabic word 'ayn, which means both "spring" and
"eye" to provide explanations. They depicted Mecca as the
"eye" of the earth and Zamzam as the source of its water.
Just as the water of the human eye is salty, so should be
the water of Zamzam. But this poetic imagery leaves al-
Nabulusi with an unsatisfactory image of a one-eyed earthi
Resorting to his imaginative mapping of Jerusalem and
Mecca to set things right, al-Nabulusi writes:

The saltiness of the eye's water is evidently true
Not out of imperfection, but rather of perfection.
For this reason Zamzam's water is salty
And so is Silwan's; both are refreshingly cold.

7a /AKKACH

These are the two eyes of the earth,
One of the right, the other of the left.
The right is in Mecca, the left in Jerusalem,
Yet all the worlds are mere imagination.^^

Notes

1 Al-Nabutusi, al Hadra al-Unsiyya fi ahRihIa al-Qudsiyya. edited by A, al-'Ulabi
(Beirut: al-Masadif, 1990). The journey took place in 1690 AD.

2 Samer Akkach, "Mapping Difference: On the Islamic Concept of fada'il," in
De-Placing Difference: Architecture, Culture and Imaginative Geography, edited
by S. Akkach, Proceedings of the third international symposium of the Centre
for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture lAdelaide: CAMEA. 2002), 9-21.

3 On mapping, see Denis Cosgrove (ed.l, Mappings, London: Reaktion Books,
1999; and Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural
Cartographies (London: Macmillan Press, 1996).

4 King. 16.

5 D. Cosgrove, "Introduction: Mapping Meanings, " in IVIappings, 1-23,

6 See Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd Edition, "Fadila."

7 Yi-Fu Tuan, "Geopiety: A Theme in Man's Attachment to Nature and to
Place," in Geographies of the l^ind: Essays in Historical Geography, edited by
David Lowenthal and Martyn J, Bowden (New York: Oxford University Press.
1976). 11-39.

8 James Speculation, "Critique and Invention." in Cosgrove. l\/!appings. 213-52.
See also. King, "The Map that Precedes the Territory," Mapping Reality, 1-17.

9 J. Corner, "The Agency of Mapping," in Cosgrove, Mappings, 213.

10 Christian Jacob, "Mapping in the Mind: The Earth from Ancient Alexandria,"
in Cosgrove, Mappings, 24-49,

11 J. B. Harley and D. Woodward (eds). History of Cartography. 11:1,
Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press. 1992), 7,

12 Milka Levy-Rubin and Rehav Rubin. "The Image of the Holy City m Maps and
Mapping." in City of the Great King, edited by Nitza Rosovsky (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1996), 352. For medieval map-making and visualisa-
tion in the Christian context, see Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How
Medieval Map-makers Viewed their World (London: The British Library, 1997).
Oleg Grabar, The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 16. Grabar confirms the absence of maps of
Jerusalem until the late Ottoman period,

13 Levy-Rubin and Rubin, 1996.

14 Al-Nabulusi, al-Hadra al-Unsiyya. 187-92.

15 Ibid., 190.

Illustrations

Fig. 1: A cosmic map from Ma'rifetname by the eighteenth-century mystic
scholar Ibrahim Haqqi (d. 1780). The map shows the "topography" of the
world, consisting of the earth and the skies, the underworld and the heavenly
world, with all encompassed by the divine throne.

Figs. 2 & 3; Two maps by Heinrich Bunting (1 545-1 606), 1 581 . Europe, depict-
ed in the form of a crowned Virgin, and Asia, depicted in the form of the famed
Greek winged Horse. Pegasus.
Fig, 4: Al-ldnsi's World map, dated 1456.

AKKACH,/ 75

JAMES ELKINS

FROM BIRD-GODDESSES TO JESUS 2000:

A VERY, VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF RELIGION AND ART

Sooner or later, anyone involved in the academic study of
the arts will come across a strange problem: there is almost
no modern religious art in museums or in books of Western
art history. It is a problem that is at once obvious and odd,
known to most who study art, yet hardly discussed.

The Problem of Even Starting a Conversation

For some people, art simply is religious, whether the artists
admit it or not, for it expresses such things as the hope of
transcendence or the possibilities of the human spirit. The
absence of religious art from museums specializing in mod-
ernism is seemingly due to a kind of prejudice on the part
of curators' narrow coterie of mainly academic writers who
have not acknowledged what has always been apparent: art
and religion are entwined. For example, Jackson Pollock is
a religious painter even though neither he nor the serious
critics of his work have thought of his work as religious.

Some believe that modern art like Pollock's cannot be reli-
gious, because it would undo the project of modernism by
going against its own sense of itself, its nature, especially
if modernism was predicated on the rejection of pre-modern
institutions, religion among them. Some modernists were
also suspicious of the nineteenth-century academic custom
of using art to tell religious stories. A contemporary paint-
ing of the Assumption of the Virgin would be carrying on a
moribund tradition of narrative painting, last encouraged at
the end of the nineteenth century. Modernism, it could be
said, has relinquished all that.

For others, Pollock's paintings might well be religious, but it
is difficult to construct an acceptable argument describing
how his works express religious feelings. The word religion
can no longer be coupled with the driving ideas of mod-

ernist discourse. The two ways of talking have become
alienated from each other, and it would be artificial and
insensitive to bring them together.

And for others still, the whole problem is misstated,
because Pollock might well be religious in some respects
and non-religious or irreligious in others. There is no mono-
lithic art any more than there is a property for it called reli-
gious. These terms are just too diffuse to work. What mat-
ters is the life of a particular Pollock painting. For example,
there is a way to argue that Pollock's Man/Woman sustains
religious ideas, but with She-Wolf, the correct domain of
explanation might be Pollock's mid-twentieth-century sense
of myth.

Some might argue that Pollock serves as a poor example to
make the case that modernism is not religious because
Abstract Expressionism effectively erases explicit symbols
and stories in favor of non-verbal gestures. Look elsewhere
in modernism, earlier abstract painters for example, and you
will find plenty of religious art: Paul Klee made religious
paintings, as did Marc Chagall and Georges Roualt.
Modernism is bound to religion just as every movement
before it has been.

The differences between these opinions run deep. For peo-
ple in my profession of art history, the very fact that I have
written this essay will be enough to cast me into a dubious
category of fallen and marginal historians who do not under-
stand modernism or postmodernism. But here, I am after
something simple, and more introductory: to set out, in the
briefest possible compass, the salient facts about the alien-
ation of the academic discipline of art history and the study
of religious meaning in art. I hope that what I have to say

76 /ELKINS

will be taken generously, not as if this were the armature
for a full history, but in the spirit I intend it: as an attempt
to start conversations.

Art as Ritual and Religion

Once upon a time — but really, in every place and in every
time — art was religious. Eight thousand years ago, Europe,
Asia, and Africa were already full of sculpted gods, god-
desses, and totemic animals. There were bull-gods and but-
terfly-gods, bird-goddesses and frog-goddesses, and deities
that were nothing more than lumps of uncarved stone.
Neolithic people left offerings, built altars, and etched pic-
tures into rock walls.

Art was religious or at least ritualistic, and remained so in
the earliest civilizations: in Sumer and Akkad, in Hittite and
Phrygian Turkey, in Egypt and Persia. The inception of
Christianity did not change art's religious purpose. In a love-
ly scene of the Madonna and Child in a landscape, from the
beginning of the third century, a prophet stands to their
right, raising his arms in a gesture that says, "Behold!" The
figures sit in the shade of a small tree with oversize flow-
ers. It must have been a refreshing scene to contemplate for
the Christians who worshipped in the dank Catacomb of
Priscilla, beneath the streets of Rome, and it serves as one
example of the way in which the early Christian religion
used painting as a mode of expression. Art continued to
serve religion through the Renaissance.

In addition, what are known reflexively as art and religion
were inseparable through much of the recorded history of
China, India, and Mesoamerica. The same parallel and com-
patible purposes of art and religion can be found in images
made by the Incas, the Scythians and Ife, the Moche and
Code, Jains and Phrygians, and even the people — whose
name is lost — who built the pyramids at Teotihuacan.

Art as Expression

There is a problem with this history. Although there is plen-
ty of religious painting after the Renaissance in Western art
history — even at the beginning of the twenty-first century
there is a tremendous amount of religious art — something
happened in the Renaissance: the meaning of art changed.
Art began to glorify the artist and artist's skills took prece-
dence over the subject depicted.

This is a much-debated subject. Historians such as Hans
Blumenberg and Hans Belting, and philosophers including
JiJrgen Habermas, have written histories of the West cen-

tered on the nature of this change. ^ Given Marx's critique
of religion as an artifact of society, "any return to tradition-
al values (from Catholic or Islamic fundamentalism to
Oriental New Age wisdom) is doomed to fail" because it is
"impotent in the face of the thrust of Capital. "^

On the other hand, the Protestant Reformation and Italian
Counter-Reformation produced art that remains indispensa-
ble for understanding the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. As the historian David Morgan argued, "Who can
think of the Enlightenment without natural religion? Who
can think of American democracy without Jefferson dis-
secting the New Testament to extract the moral teachings
of Jesus?"3

It is a difficult problem. Yet on balance, I think more is
risked by defending the presence of religion in post-
Renaissance art than by insisting on its necessary absence.
In the Renaissance, the representation of piety seeped into
the codification of art. Art historians such as William Hood
and Georges Didi-Huberman have tried to understand the
delicate frames of mind that led painters like Fra Angelico
to put humanist learning to the service of pious aims.*

By the eighteenth century, there were more signs of strain.
When Francisco Goya was commissioned to make religious
paintings, he suddenly became serious and dropped the
bizarre imaginative license. North of the Pyrenees, Francois
Boucher and Jean-Honore Fragonard lost a sense of play-
fulness when they had to depict holy scenes. In effect,
those artists split their oeuvres: painting itself worked dif-
ferently in religious and secular contexts.

Biblical episodes and figures were still common in the nine-
teenth century, but they were handled differently from sec-
ular themes. For the painter Ary Shaffer, religious commis-
sions were matters of the most pole-faced sobriety;
Thomas Couture made stupendous paintings of the ancient
world, bursting with gold, swags of luscious red drapery,
spilling cornucopias, and dancing maidens, but his religious
work is at once ambitious and entirely unconvincing. For
such painters, religious commissions were a duty, prose-
cuted soberly and honorably. Painting itself — its highest
possibilities and ambitions — often had to be pursued outside
of religious commissions.

Some nineteenth-century artists were rabid atheists but
many others, including Eugene Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres, and Thomas Cole practiced their faiths.

ELKINS/ 77

But when do these facts aid in an understanding of the
painting? Caspar David Friedrich and Otto Philip Runge were
religious: Runge was a pious Lutheran, and Friedrich was a
Pietist. Runge's Die Tageszeiten paintings were intended for
a Gothic church he designed, and one of Friedrich's first
paintings was an elaborate altarpiece. Yet Runge's work
was iconographically eccentric, while Friedrich's was often
stripped of explicit religious meaning. Friedrich experiment-
ed with images of nature infused with a nameless, almost
pantheistic spirit, and Runge made dazzling paintings with
idiosyncratic figures. Though these artists were not atheists
or even "non-religious," the manifestations of Christianity in
nineteenth-century art by artists such as Friedrich, Runge,
William Blake, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Samuel
Palmer (who painted bizarre and intense visions of English
countryside), were subjective and often inimical to ordinary
liturgical use.^

At this point the relation of art and religion could be clari-
fied: gradually, the most inventive and interesting art sepa-
rated itself from religious themes in Western art history. By
the time of the Impressionists, there did not seem to be
room left for religion at all. Monet was preoccupied with
light and color, Seurat was bent on taking painting to a new
formal stage, while Cezanne was interested in capturing
nature faithfully.

At the same time, religion persistently rose to the surface
like a half-sunken boat. At the turn of the century, some
lesser-known painters, such as Arnold Bbcklin, Ferdinand
Knopff, and Odilon Redon worked in a mystical space
between painting and poetry. Van Gogh had very passion-
ate, if obscure, thoughts about how his art worked as reli-
gion, although art historians tend to avoid the subject his
confused thoughts on art, nature, miracles, and divinity.
The book Van Gogh and Gauguin, for example, skims over
the religious meaning of paintings such as Starry Night in
favor of an analysis of the picture's geographical location
and its secular literary sources. ^

Religion in the Pedagogy of Modernism
But now, a hundred years later, it appears that religion has
sunk out of sight. The mainstreams of modernism, begin-
ning with Cezanne and Picasso and including Surrealism and
Abstract Expressionism, were increasingly alienated from
religion. Surrealism's rejection of religion took a particularly
intransigent form on account of Sigmund Freud's critique of
God imagined as a projection.'' It is telling that the major
book connecting Surrealism to religion. Surrealism and the

Sacred, is written by an artist and not an historian; it
belongs more to the contemporary revival of Jungian-
inspired spirituality than to the historiography of
Surrealism. s Most pop art, minimalism, conceptual art,
video, and installation art seems miles away from religion.
Such art can often be understood as religious, but it is not
often intended to be religious.

If you pick up one of the heavy surveys of twentieth-cen-
tury art, like H.H. Arnason's History of Modern Art, you
may get the impression that artists stopped working for the
church around the time of the French Revolution; before
that, most European painting was religious. ^ Arnason
begins his book with a lightning review of pre-modern art
from Van Eyck to Raphael, including Matthias Grunewald's
nearly insane Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-15, Colmar). The
800 pages of the book barely discuss works that focus on
religious themes. There is a photograph of Barnett Newman
standing rigidly in front of his paintings of the Stations of
the Cross (1966, National Gallery of Art, Washington), each
canvas reduced to a severely abstract pattern of "zips," as
he called them (stripes against a white ground). Another
page shows one of Emil Nolde's religious paintings, the Last
Supper {^909, Copenhagen), painted when he was in a kind
of ecstatic trance.

There is also a reproduction of Salvador Dali's Christ of St.
John of the Cross (1951, Glasgow), but it is more an exam-
ple of Dali's "paranoiac-critical" surrealist method than a
religious painting. After all, the crucified Christ is shown
hovering uncomfortably, head-down in a deep azure sky; he
looks like the enormous spacecraft in the movie Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. Just a few other artists out of
the thousands in Arnason's book depict religious themes,
among them Georges Roualt, Marc Chagall, and the English
painters Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon. Arnason
chose one of Bacon's gruesome early pictures in which the
crucified Christ is replaced by an animal carcass, with a
monstrous man in a business suit sitting below, holding an
umbrella to keep the blood from pouring onto him.

Among these slim pickings, there is only one work that is
actually in a church — or even presented in its setting-
Matisse's designs for the little Chapel of the Rosary of the
Dominican nuns in Vence, France (1951). It might be the
only example of twentieth-century painting that is both a
consecrated religious work and also a certified member of
the canon of modernism. Jean Cocteau's church murals in
Villefranche-sur-Mer just east of Nice, France, and those in

78 /ELKINS

the chapel Saint-Blaise des Simples in Milly-la-Foret are
often reproduced, but they are not the most important of
Cocteau's works. Maurice Denis's chapel in Saint-Germain-
en-Laye, near Paris, is a fascinating example of modernist
Catholic art, but it is seldom considered alongside contem-
poraneous non-religious modernism.

...AND IN Contemporary Art

Contemporary art, I think, is as far from organized religion
as Western art has ever been. This may be its most singu-
lar achievement or its cardinal failure, depending on your
point of view. The separation has become entrenched: pro-
fessional art critics do not write about artists who follow
major religions. In schools and departments of art, religion
is considered irrelevant to the production of interesting art:
religion is understood to be something private, something
that need not be brought into the teaching of art. When the
art world discusses religion, it is because there has been a
scandal: someone has painted a Madonna using elephant
dung, or has put a statuette of Jesus into a jar of urine. '°
Otherwise, religion is seldom mentioned.

But religious art thrives outside of the art world. People
gather to see miraculous images that seem to weep real
tears, and the stories make the evening news. In the 1 990s,
a Moire pattern in the glass of a curtain-wall office building
in Clearwater, Florida was interpreted as an enormous
apparition of the Virgin Mary. Indeed, the iridescent image
captured in a snapshot looks like the outline of any
Renaissance or Baroque painting of the Virgin.' i In the
United States, such reports are much more common than in
Europe. They testify to a widespread interest in images that
have religious significance.

In the popular press, the goal of art is sometimes imagined
as a fundamentally religious undertaking. Sister Wendy
Beckett speaks eloquently about modern art as if it were all
religious. In 1999, she judged an international competition,
Jesus 2000, to find the perfect image of Jesus for the mil-
lennium.'^ There were over a thousand entries from nine-
teen different countries. Sister Wendy's pick for the winner
was Janet McKenzie's Jesus of the People, a painting of
Christ as an African-American man. Christ's body had been
modeled from a woman's body, and McKenzie painted
Native American symbols in the background. The contest
was written up in newspapers across the country. One
report in the Corpus Christ! Caller-Times described a local
woman's entry, a depiction of Jesus as a middle-aged man
wearing a baseball cap, standing on a country road with a

dead-end sign in the background. '■* The artist explained that
she had modeled the figure on a homeless man, but had
given it her father's body, her own hair, and her daughter's
nose. With her description, the painting could have been
taken as a touching act of devotion; but these entries have
not been considered as part of academic discourse.

An Equally Brief Prognosis

The conclusion of this history is obviously that fine art and
religious art have parted ways within the context of aca-
demic discourse and pedagogy. The difference between art
and art-as-religion can be made visible in many ways. The
University of California at Berkeley is adjacent to a
Theological Union. Although the faculties have amicable
relations, their purposes and understandings of art are radi-
cally different. Students in the Theological Union are study-
ing for religious vocations, and they tend to study art as a
spiritual vehicle. Students in the Department of Art History

ELKINS,' 79

are preparing for careers as college professors and curators;
when works of art are religious, they note it just as if the
art were politically oriented, concerned with gender, or of
interest for its recondite allusions.

Most ambitious and successful contemporary fine art is
thoroughly non-religious. Most New Age and spiritual art-
contemporary art made for churches — is — this is blunt,
because it needs to be said— just bad art. It is not just
because the artists are less talented than Jasper Johns or
Andy Warhol: it is because art that sets out to convey spir-
itual values goes against the grain of history. The pressure
of history is crucial: it has to be decided before it can be
possible to seriously weigh academic and non-academic
descriptions of religion and art.

Notes

1 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modem Age, translated by Robert
Wallace (Cambridge; MIT Press, 1983); Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A
History of the Image before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1994),

2 Slavoj Zizek, The Spectre is Still Roaming Around' An Introduction to the
150th Anniversary Edition of the Communist Manifesto (Zagreb: Arkzin, 1998),
72.

3 Personal correspondance wrth David Morgan, 20 May. 2002.

4 William Hood, Era Angelico at San Marco (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993); Georges Didi-Huberman, Era Angelico: Dissemblance and Eiguration.

translated by Jane Todd (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1995).

5 David Morgan provided the information on the artists' religious affiliations,
although the conclusion I draw is my own.

6 Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, edited by Douglas Druick
and Peter Zegers IChicago: The Art Institute, 2001).

7 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, translated from the German by
Katherine Jones (New York, Vintage Books, c1967l

8 Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power. Eros, and the Occult in
Modern Art (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002)- In my experience, the influ-
ence of Jung IS often pervasive and indirect in art instruction, but writers cite
secondary sources, such as Joseph Campbell, instead of Jung's primary texts.
See also Carol Becker's use of an analysis of the trickster figure in Carol Becker,
"Brooklyn Museum: Messing with the Sacred," Surpassing the Spectacle:
Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art (Lanham, MD; Rowman
and Littlefield, 2002), 43-58,

9 H,H. Arnason, History of Modern Art. fourth edition, edited by Maria Prather
Arnason (New York: Harry N- Abrams, 1998).

10 For Chris Of ill's Holy Virgin Mary and Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, see
Becker, 43 58.

1 1 Divine Mirrors: The Virgin Mary in the Visual Arts, edited by Melissa Katz
and Robert Orsi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), illustration on p. 7,
credited to Guss Wilder til.

12 "Jesus 2000," special Issue of the National Catholic Reporter, edited by
Michael Farrell (December 24, 1999),

13 Greg Bischof, "Artist Depicts Christ for New Millennium," Corpus Christi
Caller-Times (January 1, 2000): Oil.

Illustration

Fig. 1: Janet McKenzie, Jesus of the People. 48" x 30" oil on canvas

30 WELKINS

Caroline Jones Responds

James,

Your "Very, Very Brief History" is admirably polemical, but,
as such, leaves us stuffed with arguments and questions.
The broadest view of modernism's relation to religion might
situate the museum object as replacing the ritual one — the
altarpiece becomes available as art as soon as it is taken
from the cathedral and placed in Le Louvre. A ritual aes-
thetic function replaces the ritual religious function. This
one-way street, as Benjamin might have called it, charts a
historical path that is difficult to reverse — and this, I take it,
is the story you seek to tell. Nonetheless, I think there is
tremendous eschatological energy fueling twentieth-century
(and early twenty-first century) art, and a thwarted appetite
for "reading" religion in contemporary art.

Let the conversation begin,

— Caroline

Caroline,

I am happy to have the chance to frame this essay, and try
to answer your questions. Let me first interpose two points.

The essay is rather ruthlessly condensed from a book about
the place of religion in contemporary art (forthcoming,
20031. The book is aimed at a very wide readership: so
wide that part of my interest in the project was trying not
to alienate its potentially far-flung readers. There is an enor-
mous community of religious practitioners outside of aca-
demia for whom modernism and postmodernism have yet to
produce more than a sprinkling of viable religious objects.
(The best scholar of that wider public, I think, is David
Morgan.) For that community, the book I have written may
seem too little concerned with religion. In fact, a major reli-
gious press originally requested the book, but it was turned
down on the grounds that it was mainly about art and not
religion.

However, the community of art students is sometimes just
as far-flung. What can be done about the fact that religious
discourse is so often excluded from studio critiques? Many
art students create works that cannot be identified with any
major religion, but which are, nevertheless, clearly spiritual.
In my experience, it is rare to find studio art instructors or
art critics who are willing to address the religious aspects

of such work unless, of course, the art is clearly critical of
religion, adapts an ironic tone, or is privately spiritual in the
way Bettye Saar's altars are. From an art student's point of
view, words like "religion," and even "spirituality," may be
inappropriate: they sound clumsy or literal, and students
tend to avoid them even when they are the best available
terms to describe the work. Serious, content-oriented reli-
gious criticism is virtually absent from current art instruc-
tion. So, my book is also meant to reassure readers that I
will not be using words like religion as if they were ade-
quate or even appropriately descriptive.

The third community of readers — the historians interested in
modern and contemporary art, who sometimes speak a lan-
guage different from either of the other groups — may be
most embarrassed by the question of religion, though most
in need of asking it. I hope their different perspectives part-
ly explain the tone and rhetorical frame of the essay.

I propose a couple of quite specific definitions for "religion"
and "spirituality." The deliberately narrow meanings I would
like to adopt change the terms of the argument somewhat.
Let me take "religion," then, to mean any named, organ-
ized, institutional system of beliefs, including the trappings
of such systems: the rituals, liturgies, catechisms, calen-
dars, holy days, vestments, prayers, hymns and songs,
homilies, obligations, sacraments, confessions, vows, bar
mitzvahs, pilgrimages, credos, commandments, and sacred
texts. Religion is therefore public and social, requiring
observance, priests, ministers, rabbis, or mullahs, choirs or
cantors, and the congregation. A good foil for this sense of
religion is "spirituality." What I mean by spirituality — again,
only for the purposes of this essay and the book — is any pri-
vate, subjective, largely or wholly incommunicable, often
wordless and sometimes even unacknowledged system of
beliefs. Spirituality in this sense is only part of religion.
Artists, I would argue, often try to discard the trappings of
religion, in order to arrive at something that I think has to
be called by a different name — spirituality.

Given those two definitions, let me try to answer some of
your questions.

Jones: Isn't your view of abstraction very literal lor, as
Michael Fried might say, "literalist?") All you have to do is
move three feet over in the Museum of Modern Art, and you
would see Barnett Newman's Covenant, or heaven forfend,
the magisterial The Stations of the Cross: Lemi Sabachthani
at the National Gallery of Art. In what sense is the Newman-

ELKINS/ 81

Rothko-Morris Louis axis of sublimated Talmudic painting
any less "about" religion than the haloed lady with the
baby?

You ask whether modernist works are "any less 'about'
religion than the haloed lady with the baby." I would say
they are, and I propose that the fulcrum of the argument is
in the "about." From a religious practitioner's point of view,
an enormous gulf exists between work that is "about" reli-
gion and work that can function in religious ritual. In that
sense, modern and contemporary art really is profoundly
non-religious. Art world venues admit work that is ironic
about religion, that is openly critical of religion, that com-
ments on religion, that modifies religious forms and sym-
bols, that is private and spiritual (in the sense I intend), but
It does not admit straightforward, sincere instances of reli-
gious work. Artworks can be spiritual, and they can be
about religion, but they cannot be religious. For example,
many religious groups have used the Rothko chapel over the
years (including, for example, Zoroastrians), and I am happy
to admit them all as counterexamples to my thesis. A few
years ago, 1 spent several days reading every one of the vis-
itors' books that have been kept since the chapel opened.
There are thousands of comments, and most are about the
paintings as abstraction or somehow about religion. When
the comments mention religion, they usually describe the
paintings as ambiguous or otherwise troubling references to
religious meaning. I hope my sense of modernism isn't "lit-
eral" if I make the distinction between works that are
"about" religion and those that can function in religious set-
tings, for religious purposes. The Rothko chapel has long
done both, but isn't it the exception that proves the rule?
Of contemporary art production, how many works have
functioned as religious objects?

Jones: I want to argue with your history of modernism, as
well as art. Wasn't the European painter "split" even more
in the age of manuscript marginalia than in the supposedly
modern period? The sacred geometry of the page enforced
the separation of an outer world of farting cuckolds and an
inner world of divine visions, mediated by the Word.
Instead, the modern humanist subject was supposed to
become a unified soul.

This is an enormous question which I cannot address very
well here. In my mind, it leads directly into the contempo-
rary historiography of medieval art, especially in the work of
the recently deceased Michael Camille. His debates with

Hans Belting concerning the "modernity" of medieval art are
important but unresolved steps.

Jones: What are the "essentials of religious meaning"
Friedrich strips? What could be more essential in its reli-
giosity (essentially, in a German sense) than a romantic
churchyard or a cross on a mountain? It seems to me that
modern artists were, and are, constantly struggling to find
contemporaneous ways to speak the divine (if always out-
side the official strictures of the church).

No one knows how Friedrich intended to use his altar, and
no one can quite say how his cromlechs, ruined churches,
or wayside shrines carry religious meaning. Joseph
Koerner's reading— that they are metaphors of self, pres-
ence, and memory — is far from religion; and some other
readings are too close because they see things like crom-
lechs as simple signifiers of Friedrich's sense of religion,
whatever that may be. It is entirely true that "modern artists
were, and are, constantly struggling to find contemporane-
ous ways to speak the divine." In the vocabulary I propose,
"divine" is closer to spirituality than religion: it is private,
non-social, and partly incommunicable. Erasing the differ-
ence between the largely illegible evidence of Friedrich's
spirituality in his paintings, and contemporary German
Pietism (Friedrich's religion), would also erase the distance
between his fragmentary iconography and contemporane-
ous religious iconography. I want to maintain that differ-
ence, and distance.

Jones: Is your theory confounded by the fact that Van Gogh
worked as a lay preacher during the period of the Potato
Eaters? There seems to be a confusion in your account
between the spiritual aspirations of the artists, the embar-
rassment of art history over "modern religious art" at the
Vatican, and the continuous use of images — even modern
ones — in popular religion throughout the twentieth century
(see the illustration of Frank Stella's cruciform copper paint-
ing in a 1960s article about Teilhard de Chardin). Would a
theory of reception be more pertinent?

Is my theory "confounded" by these facts? I hope not!
Since you mention theories of reception, and since we are
both interested in them, let me mention Carol Zemel's
excellent work on Van Gogh — a model of
Rezeptionsgeschichte. Van Gogh has certainly been evalu-
ated as a religious painter. Otherwise, it would be hard to
account for his popularity. But what, exactly, is religious

82 /ELKINS

about the art' For some people, it has been necessary to
find overt symbols where none may exist: heavenly appari-
tions, Last Judgments, and symbols of the incarnation. A
recent exhibition we had at the Art Institute in Chicago, Van
Gogh and Gauguin, is a nice illustration of the problem. In
the very detailed catalog, there is only a single paragraph
devoted to the "spiritual" meanings of Starry Night,
because as historians, we are justifiably wary of speculat-
ing, which is exactly what Van Gogh forces us to do. My
own sense is that he was conflicted and not fully articulate
about the ways his art worked as religious and the ways it
referred to religion. The history of reception indicates that
this very point continues to perplex viewers.

Jones: "Contemporary art, I think, is as far from organized
religion as Western art has ever been..." Nonsense. Visit
IVIarina Abramovic, granddaughter of a Serbian saint, fast-
ing away in the Sean Kelly gallery this month (through
December 2002). Or go check out Damien Hirst's crucified
skeleton, Chris Ofili's Nigerian-rap Madonna, Ann
Hamilton's penitential table of weeping teeth, or Kiki
Smith's Madonna performance on the parade to MoMA in
Queens. From a few decades back, see Chris Burden's
relics, Beuys and his dead hare, De Maria's minimalist Star
of David, or Hannah Wilke's Intra-Venus. The breakdown of
modernism into postmodernism only fueled an ongoing
effort to continue to import ever more of the standard con-
cerns of religion into art (note the substantial postmodern
literature on the sublime, for example). Do you really think
you can tell the "grain of history" from a quick paging
through of the modernist canon, as witnessed in Arnason?

all in my book, and of course there are hundreds more.) But
such art is about religion; it doesn't instantiate religion.
When contemporary artwork is called "religious," I become
worried that we may lose the ability to make a distinction
between images like those judged by Sister Wendy for the
National Catholic Reporter, which can and do work in
churches, and those which refer to religion from within an
art world context. I worry that the claim that art and reli-
gion are still productively mingled can underwrite the fur-
ther claim that the art world and the institutions and artists
involved in popular religion are effectively intertwined. (As
they seem to be, for example, in the work of Christian
Jankowski.) To me, differences run deep and need to be
theorized, as Victor Taylor (Para/Inquiry) and Mark Taylor
[Disfiguring) have tried to do. And I worry, too, about the
effect on art-teaching if the near-absence of critical dis-
course on religious meaning is taken as an asked-and-
answered question. Arnason is not an authority (thank
goodness!) but even the few examples he cites nearly all
involve references to religious practices. They are not, in
pragmatic terms, viable as religious objects outside of art-
world contexts. Burden's relics are a perfect example of
what I am provisionally calling "spiritual" work; so are
Beuys's fetish objects, and even Spero's stenciled figures
and Kiefer's burned books. ..that list is endless. But consid-
er how very few examples there are of religious works
made for churches or used in religious ceremonies:
Matisse's Chapel in Vence, Cocteau's church murals in
Villefranche-sur-Mer, and a half-dozen others — as against
the hundreds of thousands of works that are secular, iron-
ic, or largely private.

Here, you say my assertion that contemporary art is as far
from religion as art practices ever have been, is "nonsense."
This is the crux of the matter. In one sense, it is true that
my claim is "nonsense" because there are many artists who
work with religious themes. (The ones you name are almost

I hope this makes sense and that I have convinced you just
a little. The whole subject is fascinating to me not least
because it seems so nearly impossible to frame for all audi-
ences: a sure sign that it is buried very deeply in our use of
language and critique.

ELKINS/ 83

t I N 2. PRtii>

IOC ISO) ■"

84 /URBAN

FLORIAN URBAN

THE SPIRIT OF THE CITY:

TRANSCENDENCE AND URBAN DESIGN IN

POSTWAR BERLIN

Hauptstadt Berlin

In 1958, thirteen years after the war had ended, the city of
West Berlin, in collaboration with the West German
Government in Bonn, organized a peculiar competition.
Architects and urban planners were asked for proposals to
redesign both halves of Berlin's divided inner city as the
center for a German capital. The participants had to base
their entries on the imaginary grounds that Berlin was reuni-
fied, that they had unlimited financial resources, and that
they possessed infinite political power.' Although the polit-
ical and economical preconditions were deeply unrealistic,
the competition, Hauptstadt Berlin (Capital Berlin), was any-
thing but Utopian. The planning guidelines to which the par-
ticipants had to adhere were taken from existing Western
European cities. Regarded as "the most important competi-
tion in Europe," Hauptstadt Berlin was paradigmatic for
urban design practice in the postwar era.^

Nearly all the proposals advocated a comprehensive
destruction of Berlin's historic urban fabric, even though a
significant portion had survived the war and could have
been restored. ■^ At the same time, competition organizers,
participants, and commentators repeatedly emphasized nos-
talgia for the site and wanted to maintain the historic con-
tinuity of the proposed new city with the metropolis of the
prewar era. This apparent contradiction was tightly con-
nected to a conception of the city as a spiritual entity. Most
proposals were imbued with the idea of a transcendental
urban force — a "spirit of the city." This concept, which was
promoted by participants and critics, has to be related both
to the experience of the wartime destruction in Berlin and
to the notion of progress and renewal that had been devel-
oped in the prewar era. The pattern of representing the city
in quasi-religious terms proved consequential for the remod-

eling of Berlin and other German cities in subsequent
decades, and accounted for a number of difficulties with
which the city still has to contend at both the social and the
infrastructural level.

Restructuring the Historic Center

The jury of the Hauptstadt Berlin competition included West
Berlin's Head of Construction Hans Stephan, the architects
Otto Bartning, Werner Hebebrand, and Edgar Wedepohl,
and numerous other prominent architects and construction
officials.* With the exception of Cornelius van Eesteren
from Amsterdam, Pierre Vago from Paris, and Alvar Aalto
from Helsinki, all jurors were German. They promoted a
homogeneous vision of a modernist city, with functional
separation, loosely dispersed high-rise buildings, and the pri-
macy of the automobile. With respect to both its break from
the existing city and the scale of the proposed streets and
buildings, the most radical proposal was not that of the first
prize winner, the office of Spengelin, Eggeling, Pempelfort,
but rather that of Hans Scharoun and Wils Ebert, who were
awarded one of two second prizes (Fig. 1).5

Journalist Erich Link singled out Scharoun and Ebert's com-
petition entry as a "truly great design proposal," whose
essence could be summarized by its extraordinary "human
scale. "^ Sabina Lietzmann pointed out that the proposal's
great achievement lay in its "respect for the historically
given fixed points in Berlin's inner city" and in the fact that
it conserved "the layout of the old city plan."' Today, these
judgments are profoundly baffling since the implementation
of Scharoun and Ebert's proposal would have required the
demolition of nearly all of the surviving prewar buildings,
including some historic monuments that the competition
organizers had listed as "fixed points," meaning that their

URBAN,' 85

preservation was desirable, though not required. Scharoun
and Ebert proposed an inner city scattered with solitary
buildings spread at great distances from each other, sur-
rounded by enormous pedestrian zones. Some of the build-
ings would measure more than ten times the width of
Berlin's broadest boulevard, Unter den Linden. As a conse-
quence of the strictly asymmetric outlines of buildings and
surrounding areas, the prewar street plan would be wiped
out. In order to maintain the huge pedestrian spaces and to
keep motor traffic low, the plan proposed even more enor-
mous subterranean parking lots. The largest would be situ-
ated under an area in the southern Friedrichstadt, approxi-
mately five hundred meters wide and two kilometers long,
indicated by the horizontal, slightly bent structure in the
lower third of the drawing. Berlin's inner city, as a whole,
would be accessible through numerous six- to eight-lane
freeways which far exceeded the competition organizers'
requirements. Some of the proposed lanes were more than
one hundred meters wide, cutting through residential neigh-
borhoods that had been spared by wartime destruction. Due
to the enormous scale of buildings and traffic areas, the
coherence and consistency of Scharoun and Ebert's city
design proposal could hardly be experienced by the pedes-
trian user of these spaces, but would be limited to the
bird's-eye-view of the plan.

World City Spirit

In his call for proposals. West Berlin's Head of Construction
and jury member Hans Stephan emphasized that, "the spir-
itual task (die geistige Aufgabe) of the competition. ..is to
revive and express the image of a world city (das Bild einer
We/tstadt) and capital Berlin in a modern... form. "S The
belief in a spiritual essence of the city, which pervaded the
competition, was epitomized by the term Weltstadt (World
City). We/tstadt was first and foremost a cultural assertion,
explicitly rooted in the international significance that the
city had had before the war. Organizers and participants
repeatedly stressed their commitment to the "spirit" (Geist)
of prewar Berlin, implying that a quintessential metaphysi-
cal force — unalterable by political and economic change or
even demolition — was still inherent in the present city of
ruins and political division. Since this culturally defined
"spirit of the city" was unaffected by the aggression implic-
it in the Nazi capital's claims for metropolitan significance,
it was able to warrant an unambiguously positive concep-
tion of historic continuity.

In Hans Scharoun's plan tor Berlin, the "spirit of the city"
was omnipresent. Scharoun claimed that the city's meta-

physical essence, solidified in a primordial image, constitut-
ed the foundation of urban life. In Hauptstadt Berlin, he
explicitly connected this notion of spirit to a remote (and
better) past;

In order to liberate us from the grips of a concept
that has become alien to the city's nature (i.e. the
nineteenth-century notion of the city), we need a
fundamental idea, such as that which was still
alive in the context of the medieval city. We have
to regain. ..the spiritually based notion of struc-
ture, because this is the only way to reintegrate
the civilizing impulse into our cities in a meaning-
ful way. 3

Treating urban structure as a spiritual element, Scharoun
thus established the diagrammatic simplicity of a city plan
as an a priori value.

The main characteristic of Scharoun's "structure" was a
clarity and comprehensibility that could be experienced
immediately:

Contemporary representations of medieval cities
show the clarity of the city and the comprehensi-
bility of its structure as a pictorial form (gestalt-
bi/dhaft) in the same way the city presents itself
to the gaze of the arriving traveler. The big city (of
the present) does not allow for a repetition of
such a silhouette effect. Its essence can only be
experienced optically from the core — from the
inside. In Berlin, this is offered through the large
space of the Tiergarten (the Central Park); the
areas close to the Tiergarten are provided with the
corresponding form (Gestalt).^'^

Similarly, Scharoun regarded his submission to the
l-iauptstadt Berlin as a "solution in accordance with the
nature of the city."^i According to Scharoun, it was this
spiritual "nature of the city" that lies at the bottom of the
form-giving process.

We believe that what we can achieve at the
moment is the organic form of the building, the
city, and the society.... Therefore, our task is to
strive for form, to tackle the "secret of form"
(Geheimnis der Gestalt). This striving for form is
an issue of the spirit (Ge/sf) — "spirit happens, spir-
it is an event. "^2

36 /URBAN

m- -^

This line of thought can be traced back to the prewar era
and Fritz Schumacher, who conceived of a building, and
even more so, a city, as acting like an "organism" or a "liv-
ing thing. "13

The fundamental problem of Scharoun's "splrltually-based
notion of structure" Is Its ambiguous representation. Since
he considered It profoundly wrong to "let the picturesque of
the romantic medieval city distract us from the structure
that Is so essential and Important for us," he resisted trans-
lating his structure into a formal reference to the historic
city.'* Not the form, but the Intrinsic structure of the his-
toric city, its "fundamental Idea," was supposed to guide
his design. Regarding this Idea as an objective regulatory
principle, Scharoun thus feigned the general validity of his
individual experience. At the same time, he generated a
powerful new urban paradigm.

flexible terms, the "spirit of the city" lacks a formal equiva-
lent. The spiritual conception of the city, tied to a lasting
structure of the city, became a matter of faith. It seems that
in the 1950s, Scharoun and his contemporaries had subli-
mated their experience of rupture and wartime destruction
and their desire for comprehensive renewal Into the quasl-
rellglous belief In the "unalterable essence of the city,"
which they deemed fundamentally ahlstorlcal and thus,
possessing eternal validity. This conviction inspired their
persuasive model. The city was seen as Imbued with the
spirit of historic continuity. As a self-sufficient "organic"
body. It was supposed to work autonomously according to
primordial laws. In the debate surrounding the Hauptstadt
Berlin competition, it became apparent that the role of the
hermetic Images and verbal representations that attempted
to capture the "spirit of the city" was to stabilize and mon-
itor this new urban model concept.

The methodological device Scharoun used to shape his
model concept divorced the city from Its verbal and pictori-
al representation. Since clarity and comprehensibility are

The destruction of the historic urban fabric, which the
entries to the Hauptstadt Berlin competition proposed and
which was carried out in many German cities in the decade

URBAN,' 87

that followed, was closely related to a mindset that framed
the city in quasi-religious terms. The analysis of the debate
over the competition also shows that all participants, organ-
izers, and onlookers connected the promise of a better
future to a nostalgic account of the past. Throughout the
competition, memories of the prewar period were frozen
into fixed images, endowed with new significance, and
translated into an aesthetic scheme. Thus, architects and
critics developed a concept of the city as an autonomous,
hermetic organism permeated by a spiritual essence. This
model was characterized by a self-referential logic, and was
tied to an idea of historic continuity that functioned inde-
pendently from the existence of historic urban fabric. The
examination of the Hauptstadt Berlin competition shows
how this model was controlled by a specific way of repre-
senting the city in spiritual terms, both on a rhetorical and
on a pictorial level. The effects of this process, both in the
physical form of the city and in the debate on urban restruc-
turing, are still felt.

Notes

1 Carola Hem, "Planungsgrundlagen fur den stadtischen Ideenwettbewerb
'Hauptstadt Berlin' — Denkschnft Berlin" (Call for proposals for the competition
"HaupstsTadt Berlin," 19571, in Hauptstadt Berlin. Internationaler stadtebaulich-
er Ideenwettbewerb 1957/58, edited by Helmut Geisert, Dons Haneberg, and
Carola Hem. Berlinische Galene {Berlin: Berlinische Galerie. c1990l, 298.
Catalog for an exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin from 3 November
1990 to 6 January 1991,

2 "Bedeutendster Wettbewerb Europas," Der Tagesspiegel (June 29, 1958}.

3 Most scholars believe that more historic buildings were demolished as a result
of urban renewal in postwar Berlin than had been destroyed during the war-
Compare Wolfgang Schache, "Von der Stunde Null und der Legende des
WJederaufbaus," in Wendezeiten in Architektur und Stadtplanung in the series
Arbeitshefte des Instituts fur Stadt- und Regionalplanung der TU Berlin Vol. 36,
edited by Erich Konter (Berlin: Universitatsbibliothek der Technischen
Universitat Berlin, 1986), 79; and Wolfgang Schache and Wolfgang J- Streich,
"Wiederaufbau Oder Neuaufbau? Uber die Legende der total zerstdrten Stadt,"
in IFP Stadtenttwicklung Berlin nach 1945. ISR-Diskussionsbeitrag Nr. 17, edit-
ed by Wolfgang Schache and Wolfgang J. Streich (Berlin, 1985), 44. In 1945,
approximately fifty percent of Berlin's inner city was destroyed-

4 Hein, 445,

5 From 1 945 to 1 946, Hans Scharoun ( 1 893-1 972) was the director of the (still
undivided) city planning commission, where he authored the first comprehen-
sive reconstruction plan for all of Berlin, In 1946, he became the director of the
urban design program at West Berlin's Technische Universitat, a position he

held until his retirement in 1958. In addition, from 1955 to 1968. he was the
president of the renowned Akademie der Kunste. Wils Ebert was a Berlin-based
architect. The )ury awarded the first prize to the office of Friedrich Spengeiin.
Fritz Eggeling. and Gerd Pempelfort. based in Hamburg and Hanover, The other
second prize was given to Egon Hartmann (Mainz) and Waiter Nickert
(Gelsenkirchen). Hauptstadt Berlin, 1990, 445-446.

6 Erich Link, "Erne City ohne Zukunft' Glanz und Elend eines Wettbewerbs," Die
Kuitur (March 1, 1959). "Der Begriff 'menschlicher Maftstab' ..trifft bei
Scharoun/Ebert die 'Kennzeichnung der Substanz.' '

7 Sabina Lietzmann. "Der Ideenwettbewerb 'Hauptstadt Berlin,'" Neue Zurcher
Zeitung (August 17, 1958). "Der Grundnfi der aiten Stadtanlage ist im iibrigen
gewahrt. wie uberhaupt bei alien Entwurfen em Respekt vor den historisch
gegebenen Fixpunkten der Berliner City zu beobachten ist."

8 Hans Stephan, "Hauptstadt Berlin. Ein politischer Wettbewerb," Bauen und
Wohnen 3 (1959); 105. "Als geistige Aufgabe des Wettbewebs war gefordert.
daB die Wiederaufbauvorschlage in moderner, , Form das Bild einer Welt- und
Hauptstadt Berlin wieder sichtbar zum Ausdruck bnngen sollten." Quoted by
Hubert Hoffmann,

9 Hans Scharoun, "Vom Stadt-Wesen und Architekt-Sein" [speech at the award
ceremony for the Fritz-Schumacher-Prize in Hamburg, dated December 9,
19541, Hans Scharoun: Bauten. Entwurfe, Texte. edited by Peter Pfannkuch, in
the series Schnftenreihe der Akademie der Kunste Vol. 10, Berlin, 1993. 229.
"Es bedarf der Kraft einer tragenden Idee, wie sie in diesem Zusammenhang m
der mittelalterlichen Stadt noch lebendig war, um uns aus den Klammern etnes
wesensfremd gewordenen Begriffs (das Konzept der vormodernen Stadt] zu
befreien. [DenI seellsch-geistig fundierten Strukturbegriff.-.mussen wir zuruck-
gewinnen, weil dann wieder em smnvolle Einbindung des Zivilisatorischen
mbglich sein wird."

10 Ibid., 231. "Zeitgenbssische Darstellungen mittelalterlicher Stadte zeigen
gestaltbildhaft das Uberschaubare der Stadt und die ErfaUbarkeit ihrer
Struktur — so wie sie sich dem Blick des Ankommenden erschliefSt. Die
GrofSstadt gestattet keine Wiederholung solcher sihouettenhaften Wirkung. Ihr
Wesen ist nur vom Kern her — vom Inneren her — optisch erschliefSbar, In Berlin
ist dies durch den weiten Raum des Tiergartens geboten, den dem Tiergarten
nahen Stadtteilen entsprechende Gestalt gegeben,"

1 1 Hans Scharoun, "Beschreibung des Wettbewerbsentwurfs fur Hauptstadt
Berlin" [description of the competition entry for "Hauptstadt Berlin," dated Sept
9, 19581, in Scharoun Nachlass, archive of the Berlin Akademie der Kunste
Berlin, Nachlass n. 212. "WesensgemafSe Losung" [i.e. dem Wesen der Stadt
gemaU].

12 Hans Scharoun, 1954, 232. "Wir meinen, das uns zur Zeit Erreichbare ist
die Organform des Bauwerkes, der Stadt und der Gesellschaft... Unsere
Aufgabe also ist das Gestaltanliegen, das Angehen des 'Geheimnisses der
Gestalt,' Dieses Gestaltanliegen ist eine Sache des Geistes — Geist geschieht,
Geist ist Ereignis."

1 3 Fritz Schumacher, Der Geist der Baukunst (Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,

1938), 206.

14 Hans Scharoun, 1 954, 229. ".,.sich durch das Malerische der romantischen.

/URBAN

mittelalterlichen Stadt in ihrer fur uns wesenhaften und wichtigen Struktur (detail). The small building with four towers in the middle is the Reichstag,

ablenken zu lassen." which the participants were required to preserve according to the competition

guidelines. The government center is to the left of the Reichstag. In the upper

ILLUSTRATIONS right corner stands Museum Island with the Schlossplatz, next to the octagonal

Fig, 1: Hauptstadt Berlin. Internationaler stadtebaulicher Ideenwettbewerb Leipziger Platz. In the lower right corner is the detail of a shopping center and

1957/58. 1990, 81. Scharoun and Ebert's proposal for the Hauptstadt Berlin the enormous subterranean parking structure. Picture taken from Berlinische

competition. Galerie, ed.. Hauptstadt Berlin. Internationaler stadtebaulicher Ideenwettbewerb

Fig. 2: Scharoun and Ebert's proposal for the Hauptstadt Berlin competition 1957.58. Berlin, 1990, 79.

URBAN' 89

90 /CHA

JAE CHA
CHURCH IN URUBO, BOLIVIA

This project is In Urubo, a rural village twenty minutes by
car from Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The village lacks a viable econ-
omy; because the men work in remote cities for weeks at a
time, the women have a dominant presence In the village.
The people of Urubo live predominantly In traditional mud
huts and do not have a public meeting space for communal
activities. Consequently, the project evolved Into a commu-
nity center designed specifically for women and children —
an open structure able to accommodate 1 50 people. It Is
intended for use as a church, but also functions as a kinder-
garten and a market place.

The project took the form of a collaboration between skilled
workers from the community and voluntary workers organ-
ized by the NGOs which financed the project. It was over-
seen by LIGHT, a non-governmental, non-profit organization
dedicated to creating small-scale civic architecture for eco-
nomically diverse and self-supporting, yet developing com-
munities.

The design concept is based on the verse from 2
Corinthians 3:16: "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." This idea is best
expressed in the open, uncluttered, and circular plan. The
open plan allows for people to sit on individual stools and
move about as they wish, unlike the fixed pews found In
conventional church design.

CHA/ 91

The design of the church also maximized natural energy
resources. In Urubo, the connections to water and electric-
ity sources are relatively straightforward. The services and
storage for the church are contained in a pre-existing adja-
cent building to ease maintenance and to manage insects.
Thus, the church is fully open, allowing natural light and
wind to fill the room.

92 /'CHA

CHA/ 93

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

ISRAEL; Fig. 1 : Reprinted from Sensation: Young British Artists from
the Saatchi Collection (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1 998), 1 33;
Figs, 2 & 3; Reprinted from Lorenza Trucchi, Francis Bacon,
Translated by Jofin Sfiepley (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
1975), plates 70 and 26.

ASHER: Alt images are by the author of the article.

PICCIOTTO: Image courtesy of Wijrzburg Universitatis Bibliothek.

JONES; All images courtesy of the Estate of Robert
Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York.

DOMEYKO; All images are by the author of the article.

APARICIO GUISADO; All images are by the author of the article.

JAR20MBEK; All images reprinted from The Splendor of Dresden:
Five Centuries of Art Collecting (New York; IVIetropolitan Museum of
Art, 19781.

ANDERSON; All photos are by the author of the article; Fig. 2:
Reprinted from Gonzalo Borras Gualis, El Islam de Cordoba at
Mudejar (IVIadrid: Silex, c1990); Fig. 5: Reprinted from Sheiia Blair
and Jonathan Bloom, The Art & Architecture of Islam 1250-1800
(New Haven; Yale University Press, 1994).

RABBAT; All images are by the author of the article.

HADIMIOGLU; All images are by the author of the article.

AKKACH; Fig. 1: Reprinted from J. 8. Harley and David Woodward
(eds.). The History of Cartography (Chicago; University of Chicago
Press, 1987), vol. 2, plate 3; Figs. 2 & 3; Reprinted from The
Discovery of the World: Maps of the Earth and the Cosmos, /[/laps
from the David M. Steward Collection (IVIontreal; David M, Steward
Museum, 1985), 80-81; Fig. 4; Reprinted from Harley and
Woodward, vol. 2, plate 1 1.

ELKINS; The image is printed courtesy of the artist, Janet McKenzie.

URBAN; All images courtesy of the Estate of Hans Scharoun.

CHA; All photos are by Daniel Lama.

ERRATA

The following unintentional errors were made in Talinn Grigor,
"Use/Mis-Use of Pahlavi Public Monuments and their Iranian
Reclaim," Thresholds 24 (Spring 2002): 46-53.

Page 48, Paragraph 2: "The tomb has panels narrating the story of
the Shah..." should read, "The tomb has panels narrating the story
of the 'Shahnameh.' The 'Shahnameh' or the 'Book of Kings' is
Ferdowsi's major work. It tells the story of the lives of various myth-
ical and historic Persian kings. Images from the 'Shahnameh' were
carved on the walls leading to the tomb of Ferdowsi."

Page 50, Paragraph 1: "...the space around the tomb complex was
named Freedom Square," should read "...the space around the tomb
complex was renamed Freedom Square, or The Shahyad Square,
after the Revolution. It is now a museum."

94 /CREDITS

CONTRIBUTORS

SAMER AKKACH is Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture,
Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design at The University of
Adelaide, and is Founding Director of the Centre for Asian and
Middle Eastern Architecture. He is currently a visiting scholar at MIT.

LUCIA ALLAIS received her M.Arch. from the Harvard Graduate
School of Design and a B.S. m Civil Engineering from Princeton
University. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student of History, Theory, and
Criticism in the Department of Architecture at MIT.

GLAIRE ANDERSON is a Ph.D. student of History, Theory, and
Criticism in the Department of Architecture at MIT. She received her
M.A. in Art History from the University of Virginia. Her work focus-
es on Islamic architecture in Spain.

JESUS MARIA APARICIO GUISADO is Professor at E.T.S. de
Arquitectura de Madrid. He was recipient of the Rome Prize in
Architecture and he represented Spain in the Biennale di Venezia
2000. Recently, he was Visiting Scholar at Columbia University.

FREDERICK ASHER is Professor of Art History at the University of
Minnesota. He recently completed two terms as President of the
American Institute of Indian Studies and chairs the Institute's board.
His research includes sculpture in Eastern India and contemporary
artists working in traditional modes. His most recent work. Art of
India, was published by Encyclopaedia Bntannica in December 2002.

ZEYNEP CELIK is currently a Ph.D. student in the History, Theory,
and Criticism section in the Department of Architecture at MIT. She
received her M.Arch. from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

JAMES ELKINS is Professor of Visual and Critical studies in the
Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago. His recent books include Pictures and
Tears: A History of People Who hiave Cried in Front of Paintings and
Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis.

CAGLA HADIMIOGLU received her B.Arch. from the Cooper Union
in 1993, her M.Arch. from Princeton University in 2000, and recent-
ly completed her S.M.Arch.S. at MIT.

MARK JARZOMBEK is Associate Professor of History, Theory, and
Criticism in the Department of Architecture at MIT. He has written
on a variety of subjects from the Renaissance to the modern.

CAROLINE JONES is Associate Professor of contemporary art and
theory in the Department of Architecture at MIT. Author of the prize-
winning Machine in the Studio (Chicago 1996/98), she is currently
completing Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and
the Bureaucratization of the Senses.

DANIEL BERTRAND MONK is Associate Professor at the State
University of New York, Stony Brook, where he co-directs the grad-
uate certificate program in Philosophy and Art and is a member of
the Middle East Studies faculty. He was recipient of the SSRC's
MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. He is
presently working on a book entitled The Politics of Retrospection:
Framing Middle East History in the Aftermath of the June 1967
Arab-Israeli War.

MICHAEL OSMAN is currently a Ph.D. student of History, Theory,
and Criticism in the Department of Architecture at MIT. He received
his M.Arch. from the Yale School of Architecture in 2001 and spent
the following year on a Fulbright Fellowship in Tel Aviv.

JAE CHA IS the founder of LIGHT. She received her M.Arch. from
Yale University and her B.A. from Wellesley College. She was a
Rotary Foundation Japan Scholar between 1993-95.

JOANNA PICCIOTTO is Assistant Professor of English at Princeton
University. She is working on a book entitled The Work That
Remains: Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England.

JONATHAN COONEY is a Ph.D. student in the Division of Religious
and Theological Studies at Boston University. He holds an M.A. from
Southwest Missouri State University and the M.Div. from United
Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He is currently the pastor of
Bryantville United Methodist Church in Pembroke, MA.

NASSER RABBAT, a member of the History, Theory, and Criticism
section, IS the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture at MIT.
He teaches courses on Islamic architecture, medieval urban history
and historiography, and post-colonial criticism and its ramifications
for the study of architectural history.

FERNANDO DOMEYKO has taught at the University of Chile and the
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Currently, he teaches design at
the MIT. His work has been exhibited in Chile, Spain, France,
Belgium, and in the US, most recently at MIT and Columbia
University.

FLORIAN URBAN is a Ph.D. student of History, Theory, and
Criticism in the Department of Architecture at MIT. He recieved is
M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA.

CONTRIBUTORS/ 95

DENATURED

The dominant rhetorical stance of modern science,
environmental discourse, and writing about nature is
fundamentally positivistic and representational. The
inherent ambiguity in defining nature is often used as
a crutch for vaguely constructed arguments in the
service of environmentalist or aesthetic ends.
Alternatively, we find precise usage in a post-
Enlightenment understanding via a scientific method
that, by definition, moves systematically towards lin-
ear acquisition of i<nowledge. Either mode of dis-
course avoids an interrogation of the ambiguity itself
and leads inexorably to an unexamined distinction
between culture and nature.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute
freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a
freedom and culture merely civil --to regard
man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of
Nature, rather than a member of society.

-Nature
Henry David Thoreau

It is suggested that the production of modern
cities has altered the relationship between
nature and society in a series of material and
symbolic dimensions. It is only by radically re-
working the relationship between nature and
culture that we can produce more progressive
forms of urban society.

-Concrete and Clay:

Reworking Nature in New Yoric City

Matthew Gandy

Thoreau's conception of wildness, a form of extreme
self-consciousness, reveals a method for reading,
writing, and understanding nature. This method for
accessing nature's ambiguity, exemplified in the
essay "Walking," is less a product of romanticism and
more in concordance with the equally ambiguous con-
cepts of the rhizome, smooth space, and nomadism
proposed by Gilies Deluze and Felix Guattari. In both
cases, misappropriation by scholars, critics, and com-
mentators precludes an examination of ambiguity
which may provide a more expansive understanding
of nature.

is it possible, then, that nature can be understood not
in the surveying out of space and laying of lines (or
the organization of knowledge), but rather in the
attentiveness to subtle changes and the acquisition of
new, non-linear knowledge?

Is a scientific approach towards nature limited by a
defined space concerned only with what is already
conceivable?

How can we construct a conception "ofTirban nature
responsive to ambiguity and how can we incorporate
such a nature into our built and cultural environ-
ments?

Thresholds invites submissions, including but not lim-
ited to scholarly works, from all fields. This issue
encourages a forum on nature to be approached topi-
cally, not in an attempt to define or explain, but rather
to propose philosophies and interpretations of the
relationship between culture and nature through its
inherent ambiguity.

Submissions are due 17 March 2003

Submission Policy

Thresholds attempts to print only original material.
Manuscripts for review should be no more than 2,500 words.
Text must be formatted in accordance with The Chicago
Manual of Style. Spelling should follow American convention
and quotations must be translated into English. All submis-
sions must be submitted electronically, on a CD or disk,
accompanied by hard copies of text and images. Text should
be saved as Microsoft Word or RTF format, while any accom-
panying images should be sent as TIFF files with a resolution
of at least 300 dpi at 8" x 9" print size. Figures should be
numbered clearly in the text. Image captions and credits must
be included with submissions. It is the responsibility of the
author to secure permissions for image use and pay any repro-
duction fees. A brief author bio must accompany the text.

We welcome responses to current Thresholds articles.
Responses should be no more than 300 words and should
arrive by the deadline of the following issue. Submissions by
e-mail are not permitted without the permission of the editor.

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